Developer Contest: Cell Phones and Other Mobile Devices

Have a little time on your hands, want to write software for mobile phones, maybe pick up some coffee money, and have some fun in the process? If so, Trolltech's Qtopia Greenphone Developer Challenge might be right up your alley.

The Qtopia Greenphone is the Linux-based hardware component of the Greenphone SDK. The SDK is an environment for developing and modifying application software for Qtopia Phone Edition.

The Qtopia Greenphone Developer Challenge is a global contest to spark the innovative development of Linux-based mobile phone applications. You can create your applications using either the community or commercial version of Qtopia Phone Edition.

The Developer Challenge is a two-phase competition. In Phase One, entries are accepted in these categories:

• Best Original Application
• Best Improvement of an Existing Qtopia Phone Edition Application
• Best End to End Service
• Best User Interface Experience
• Best in the Impossible to Classify Category

Entries will be judged on a set of weighted criteria including functionality, ease of use without written documentation, performance and efficiency, and originality. 25 entries will be chosen as Phase One winners.

Winning entrants from Phase One can move into Phase Two where the categories are:

• Best Open Source
• Best Commercial Application.

Judging in Phase Two is similar to Phase One however entries must be shown on a Qtopia Greenphone. Two entries will be chosen as the final Developer Challenge winners.

So what can you win? 25 Phase One winners will receive a Qtopia Greenphone, a requirement for entry into Phase Two of the contest. The final two Developer Challenge winners will each receive $5000, a Qtopia Phone Edition Professional license, and airfare with conference registration to either the Munich or California location of Trolltech Developer Days 2007, Trolltech’s annual developer conference. (Here's a hint: Don't let them stick in economy class.)

Just as a reminder, Trolltech's family of software development tools includes Qt, for cross-platform software development, and Qtopia, an application platform for creating Linux-based devices.

Good luck. If you'd like to write an article about your project, let me know -- it would be fun to publish your paper in Dr. Dobb's.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 02:32 PM  Permalink