Today, Apple released the new beta of the SDK from the iPhone. It is version 4.0.
In the iPhone DevCenter you will find this the download.
New in Version 4.0

• Multitasking
• IAd
• Over 1,500 new APIs
• …

What all is new, can be found here

A few days ago, the new Android SDK was released. There are no signifieds user features added in version 2.1. Primarily benefit from this update Nexus One developer.
You can add the update with the SDK Manager.

All changes can be found in the Release Notes on the Android developer site.
Two new extensions in the API are the live wallpaper and the signal strength. The live wallpapers are already being used in the Nexus One.

I found an interesting blog post from Robert Green. He developed the game “light racer” for android which had 250k downloads after a development time of 3 weeks (this is what he says on his website). In his blog he explains how he is refactoring this game for a 3D version on android … worth reading:

http://www.rbgrn.net/content/54-getting-started-android-game-development

The game Light Racer 3D v1.2 for Android he is describing in his “online book” is looking like this:

Android 2.0 has arrived … hhmm as I remember the 1.6 release is not too long ago … anyway here is the official google video:

Read more on: http://developer.android.com/index.html

I just found this link … http://phonegap.com/.  ” … PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you. …”

I will check it out. If you have experience with it … leave a comment …

On adobes lab site: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ they state that Flash Professional CS5 will come with a compiler that translates flash actionscript 3 into native iPhone application code. This will open the iPhone for flash cross-plattform development – so at least 3 big mobile platforms will be supported (android, iphone, symbian) and of course flash will still run in any browser that has a flashplayer plugin. So mobile developers – instead of learning J2ME, android SDK, iPhone SDK, symbian SDK and Qt … you might want to have a look at this interesting product and publish your apps on all platforms. At the website you can see a demo video and sign up for the planned beta test version … http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/

Qt is a mature development framework that allows developers to build cross platform applications for Windows, Linux and Mac. Nokia announced that Qt will be available on S60 (symbian) phones soon. This could make it easy to port a lot of already existing software to symbian phones. In my opinion this could make developing for nokia phones more interesting again and maybe fill up ovi store with lots of good apps soon … more info on Qt on: http://qt.nokia.com/

Adobe anounces a new flash player version, that could be a way to develop mobile apps for all platforms. Versions for android or symbian OS are estimated for the beginning of 2010. Beta versions are already available for testing … It is part of the “Open Screen Project” where also google is a partner since a short while.

We will be testing it to check if this could be “the future” for mobile development …

You are thinking of your first app for android or iPhone? And you don’t know where to start, how to start or even if it’s worth it to start at all? We were facing this question for a while now – and we think that the time has come to start developing apps for mobile devices. But where should you start? What are the pros and cons for android, iphone and symbian? Where can you make the most money? What is the future? Or can you just use J2ME and run your app on all platforms? Where can you find the best tutorials, which is the best IDE? Do you need dozens of differnt devices to test your app on? How can you bring your app to the app-stores or to partners like jamba? How much time will it take you to build your first tool or even a game that anyone would buy?

In the next weeks and months we are going to answer all these questions in our “Become a mobile developer howto” …