Netbeans, mobile development and screen size

I'm looking at prototyping with a HTC Advantage, which runs Windows Mobile 5 and has a screen resolution of 640x480 (or the other way if in portrait).

Before anyone jumps in and suggests developing as a native Windows mobile app, we're prototyping as a Java midlet because we also want to find out what restrictions/limitations/design considerations there are if we decide to then take the code to run on other mobile platforms: Java allows us the largest mobile-base with fewer code changes.

I'm using Netbeans 6.8 for the development, and I can't see any way to change the "Device Screen" view of a midlet from a typical mobile-phone sized screen, nor change the view from Portrait to Landscape; similarly, the emulator doesn't have a large-resolution device.

I'm using the default mobile device of ClamshellCldcPhone1. I've looked at some of the other device profiles, but none of them seem to be targetting larger screen dev开发者_Python百科ices from what I can see. And I can't find any documentation that tells me the difference between, say, ClamshellCldcPhone1 and DefaultCldcPhone2.

Has anyone any experience of this? Most of the existing things I've read have said to design for the smaller resolution and use anchoring to ensure controls stay in place; however as I've got a screen that's twice the resolution, I want to write for that resolution (given this is currently in prototype world). I can copy the code over to the HTC device to test, but this will (probably) get painful, especially during the early stages.

Any advice welcome :-)

What you need is a new emulator configuration for your handset form factor. The emulator in Netbeans is the same as the J2ME SDK (formerly Wireless ToolKit, hence the WTK acronym) from SUN Ltd.

You can make a copy of the ClamshellCldcPhone1 folder that is presumably located in
C:\Program Files\NetBeans 6.8\mobility8\WTK2.5.2\wtklib\devices
and modify the images and .properties file in your new configuration to match the device you want to emulate.

You can add/remove physical keys, resize the screen and make it touchscreen that way.

This should all be explained in the J2ME SDK documentation.

It's been a very long time since I did any of this, but I think you can just copy one of the existing profiles, rename it, and change the settings to what you want.