I’ve been very interested in development for mobile platforms ever since I attended the Flex User Group meeting in Singapore, where Rahul Garg talked about Developing AIR applications on Android.

However, I realised that performance of non-native applications on mobile devices, specifically Flash and AIR aren’t ideal. While I would really have liked to just pick up Java or Objective-C right away so as to have the best performance, writing different code to cater for different devices just isn’t going to be efficient and productive, especially if you work in an advertising agency with a small team. You can’t have the best of both worlds though, the sacrifice you have to make if you use a mobile framework, is losing the ability to call on hardware. (For example, you won’t be able to access the camera.)

Hence, I took a look at the various mobile frameworks that have popped up in the past year. Some of them are full fletched frameworks that cater to almost all mobile platforms, while some focus on deploying to both the iPhone and Android only.