VirtualBox for Smart Phones

There are more and more smart phones with linux kernels in their base. These are quickly going to become search / info / utility appliances and, I predict, replace a significant part of everyday personal computer use (you will still want a computer to do work, but for messaging, searching, simple connectivity that is / will be overkill, even in the face of netbooks).

It follows that the development process, then, of web applications (and other utility applications) will need to become less (not more) specialized. The good news - this will slowly come. The beginnings are starting to show up.

Android Phone "Live CD", usable in VirtualBox;
Palm PRE SDK (also using VirtualBox);

The Blackberry SDK - J2ME development (Eclipse); currently their tool say they require windows for their MDS RAD tool;

iPhone SDK - Requires Mac OS/X, and last I read approval from Apple before you can distribute your apps;

As you can see, this leaves you with 4 different development approaches, the last two providing their own emulators. The first three have plugins for Eclipse (so that is at least some common development feel). The first two can use Linux for a development environment (in fact, Android's "standard" development environment has been Ubuntu). The Blackberry development environment seems to be Windows only, but you _could_ run that under virtualbox on Linux, possibly with the Windows-7 Release Candidate.

So at the root, the common environment seems to be a small overlap of Palm-Pre & Android, although I don't think the development approaches are similar. In short, providing seemless services for the new "mobile pocket PC" (e.g., smartphones) is a steep hill. Clearly, this will have to change at some point. Right now, there seem to be 4 competitors for this space. A similar shootout is taking place for RIA client end, with Flex/Flash vs. JavaFX (?) vs. Json (is SVG anywhere in this mix?). That's a lot of choices for a developer of end-to-end solutions for this space.

One interesting item: Android has a native scripting environment, which (among other things) gives you access to phone facilities through a natively executed Python interpreter.

More on this later.