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 just bought a SciPhone G2 Dream and have done some initial investigation. This particular phone runs J2ME applications but I am also wondering what can be done (if anything) with native applications. Ideally I would like to get my Bluetooth GPS to work with this phone.

This page discusses getting GCC to work with Nucleus but I'm not sure whether this is useful.

Mentor (the makers of Nucleus) have a trial version of their developer suite available. I have just requested a free trial. It is a bit concerning that the website makes no mention of the cost. They also have an emulator.

What sort of phone did you get and what sort of applications are you planning to develop?