My research shows the general question is an exceptionally popular. And in the main there is no one solution for all phones using CLDC/MIDP framework.
I have developed an app that works on all the phones I have tested so far (mostly nokia's) but it throws an IOException on the Samsung jet S8003.
Any ideas as to how can possibly obtain a trace on this specific phone?
I can't answer specifically for your platform, but over the years I've found that the best approach to these kinds of problems is to implement some kind of tracing facility in your code so that you can see the code path that led to the exception. See the answers to this SO question for some ideas on how to accomplish this: Logging in J2ME.
The nice thing about this approach is that it makes it a lot easier to debug customer problems when they run your app on a phone model you've never heard of, especially if there's an easy way for them to enable the tracelog and have it sent to you automatically.