Stumbled on an interesting Slashdot post from Sprint about their developer program. I do believe the author is the guy behind Nextel's program -- hopefully Sprint will be able to adopt the openness of the Nextel position some time soon.

JSR 179 & OEM Location APIs: Location is a tricky one. The APIs themeselves don't require signatures, but getting the SDKs and tools with which to compile apps that use them on CDMA phones require additional approval. Nextel historically opened up the GPS APIs on the phone to anyone, and the only requirement was a phone-triggered privacy consent for location transmission; that's still the practice we're following for all Nextel phones. On CDMA phones, it's different--the location infrastructure that allows the GPS chip on the phone to get a location fix uses the data network more extensively than does the infrastructure on iDEN, and every location fix carries an actual monetary cost to Sprint. Our position determining equipment (PDE) servers on CDMA are sized based on certain usage assumptions, and a sudden spike in the frequency of location fixes that could result if that SDK were freely downloadable. We're working on changing all of that so that it's no longer a problem to distribute the SDKs, but it'll take some time.

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I know that these things don't necessarily say what many would like to hear -- that it's all free, that all you have to do is get a cell phone and go for it, and that there's nothing standing between you and mobile glory. But there are options:

Try it on an iDEN phone....

Try it on a non-phone...

Drop us a line....

Link.