Samsung Mobile Intelligent Terminal Developer Community (and More)
At our Boston-area Cabana event, one of the more common types of questions tended to boil down to programmatically accessing device-specific features. Interacting with WiFi, Bluetooth and cellular radio stacks seems to be quite a popular area of curiosity for many developers.
In many cases, direct access to this type of functionality is not exposed by the .NET Compact Framework. The reason - each hardware implementation is unique in its own right, and there is no Windows Mobile-equivalent of a robust Hardware Abstraction Layer. As a result, it is often necessary to work directly with the hardware vendor to determine if their is an API exposed that can be developed against.
At the Cabana event, there were questions regarding the Samsung Pocket PC Phone Edition devices. Steve Hughes did some digging around after the event, and uncovered the Samsung Mobile Intelligent Developer Community. He posted information regarding this program at the BostonPocketPC.com web site. If you are interested, check out the article for more information.
Another developer program that may be of interest is HP's iPAQ Developer Program. There are 3 levels of membership (1 free, 2 with fees). The Developer Level ($199/year) includes access to the iPAQ Developer SDK, with access to a number of iPAQ functionalities.
As I uncover more hardware vendor developer programs for Windows Mobile devices, I'll be sure to add them to the list.