How to start develop for chinese mobile phones bas

Question

I've noticed that chinese mobile phones became very popular, perhaps because of their very reasonable price and many modern features (touch screens, advanced multimedia, double sim cards etc).

I'm wondering if there's any way to develop custom solutions for this handsets as independent developer? How to obtain a toolkit and documentation?

I've found some resources, but mainly inconsistent tech notes, often in chinese only. For now I know, that majority of chinese handsets are based on chips from MediaTek (MTK), with operating system based on Nucleus RTOS and MMI (plutoMMI?) framework. Unfortunately, there is no Java RE avaiable (ok, there are some handsets with Java, however, Java isn't something I'm looking for)

Is there any SDK, documentation, emulators/simulators, how-tos, etc avaiable? How to develop, deploy and test custom application for MTK mobile?

Answer 1

I'm not exactly sure of what you mean by a 'Chinese' phone. However, you may be talking about ODM phones. Most of the time, these phones are system clones of regular phones with some customisation. It may be a good idea to just buy one and take it apart to see what platform it runs on. Maybe it uses OMAP or something else? In which case, you probably have more knowledge on how to proceed. Maybe it is even compatible with Linux.

Answer 2

I'm in same wagon like you, trying to select an smartphone with WIFI and available SDK, low cost (lower thatn 40$). Also contacted Mediatek without results. I can give you a piece of advice, in reality is what I'm doing now. Try to negotiate a bulk purchase with a supplier together with access to SDK and documentation. I did that before with an ARM based Thinclient and worked, but I had to buy 30 pcs.

Answer 3

The MTK service is charged. You need to contact them and pay for the chip, software SDK, document, and technical support.

I don't know where you get the "some resource", but it must be leaked by some customer of their, thus using these resource will be considered as illegal.

Answer 4

For platform sources this can be a starting point :

https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/downloads/nucleus-source-interest_reg

I have no real experience on RTOS, I am GNU/Linux guy

Answer 5

I am enginner at design company. I have MTK development platform for MT series mobiles with English explanation. The original release and manuals are written in English(About 300mb pdf files). The SDK have simulator written in Visual C++. MMI interface working under nucleus rtos os. The codes are V++.

Answer 6

I work with a lot of Chinese mobile phone manufacturers because we export mobile phones from China. I'm really interested in building a new applications, especially an email program, for these MTK based devices. Now it's a bit late to be looking at the 6225 platform because the 6235 platform seems to be where we'll see the most growth moving forward. The major differences that I'm aware of between the 6235 and 6225 are that 6235 supports Wi-Fi, works with EDGE, and is faster.

Steve, you mentioned the G2. I think that Android will be the breakout OS for Chinese phone manufacturing. Once their local engineers and designers get a handle on it a plethora of both ridiculous and useful applications and models will flourish and there won't be major export (customs) problems as we see now with the Windows Mobile devices (because the Chinese typically don't offer licensed software).