Midlet v/s Phone Browser app pros and cons?

Question

How do you weight the pros and cons between a Midlet and Browser based client/server app for a phone ...
What are the pros and cons of both...
And based on your experience what will you prefer to go in for and why?

I have listed some points based on which we can compare both feel free to add your own...

• Rapid development.
• Rich UI.
• Mild data transfer between client and server.
• Ease of use.
• Portability.
• Wide phone target audience.

Answer 1

Here's a great blog post tackling this exact issue. I used to work with the poster and know he's spent a significant amount of time on both sides of the fence, mobile app development and mobile web development, to have a well formed opinion on the subject.

APPropos? Are native mobile apps as supportable as mobile web apps?

I myself have only worked on the mobile apps side of things and there really isn't anything rapid or portable about the process, especially when your target platform is...all of them. However, mobile web apps will of course not allow you to supply as robust a feature set as a native app. It's all about trade-offs and concessions in the general mobile space at this time, and I think your taking the right approach to figuring out what is more important to your project.

Answer 2

The general answer is: It depends. Without knowledge of the goal, is it hard to suggest the road to it.

What type of application are you going to make?

What is most important? Performance or rapid development? Which features do you need? Database, inter-client communications? Do you need specific UI-elements, which is hard to create on a webpage? Do you need it to be portable? Which devices do you want to target? And a lot more questions...