Clossing Walled Gardens and Java vs. NativeApplications

With the risk of pointing out the obvious (and I'm not a programmer
folks, please correct if I'm wrong in any of the facts below).

The SonyEricsson P800 runs Symbian 7.0 that runs Personal JAVA (with the
JAVA Virtual Machine) as well as MID Profile 1.0 aka MIDP 1.0 (with the
K Virtual Machine). According to developers I've talked to, Symbian has
done a very good job when it comes to the implementation of Personal
JAVA on the P800.

Nokias proprietary implementation of the Symbian 6.0 core in their 7650
and 3650 only runs MIDP 1.0. No Personal JAVA or Personal Profile
(Personal Profile is supposed to replace Personal JAVA, no luck so far).

Personal JAVA is much more powerful giving the developer access to the
APIs of most features on the phone (phone book, calendar, camera and
filestructure). Personal JAVA applications can NOT be downloaded and
installed over a WAP connection however but must be downloaded to the
user's computer and transferred over Blue Tooth, data cable or infrared
to the phone.

MIDP 1.0 applications are run in a so called sandbox environment to
minimize the security risk. Therefore you won't be able to access any of
the functionality on the phone.

Do any of you know if this basic logic will change in MIDP 2.0? Which
are the key new features in MIDP 2.0?

/Johan

> --Original Message--
> From: keitai-l-bounce_at_appelsiini.net
> [mailto:keitai-l-bounce_at_appelsiini.net] On Behalf Of Jonas Petersson
> Sent: den 13 maj 2003 08:14
> To: keitai-l_at_appelsiini.net
> Subject: (keitai-l) Re: Clossing Walled Gardens and Java vs.
> NativeApplications

> Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Mon, 12 May 2003, Giovanni Bertani wrote:
> Native applications, avaible SDKs and the possibility of
> distributing=

> applications are some of the elements for innovation, having a
> common OS with a shared property between handset producers
> (Symbian).

> Well, if having a common system between handsets is considered an
> advantage, Java probably wins out over Symbian.
>
> In theory, yes - this is exactly what Java was designed for.
> In practice, the java currently available in most phones does
> not allow you to access phone book, camera etc so basically
> you can only use it for games.

> Hopefully this will change - the P800 seems better.
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Nokia, Symbian, Microsoft Smartphone and J2ME

It has finally happened. The news is already all over the place today: Nokia takes control of Symbian. It is obviously a smart move for Nokia -- it cannot let a committee comprised of its competitors to determine the fate of its most valuable phone platform (actually, I think the Series 40 is more valuable in terms of market share :).

But I perceive this as the golden opportunity for Microsoft Smartphones: the competition is now Microsoft vs. Nokia. Independent phone vendors might see Nokia as a bigger competitor (since it sells hardware as well as software) and give Microsoft a break by licensing Smartphones.

Of course, another potential winner in this race could be Java: as phone makers adopt both Symbian and MS Smartphone platforms. It is natural for them to install J2ME runtimes on both models to provide a consistent and independent platform for their developer community. I believe Motorola has already started in this direction. Only time can tell how these things would work out!

Now, what do I think about this Symbian versus MS Smartphone contest? I think Symbian is a better phone OS for end users but MS Smartphone has better developer support. But the whole landscape is changing fast. For example, if Symbian starts to aggressively support J2ME optional packages, it would become much more friendly to developers; On the other hand, the next version of Smartphone OS could well be very stable and usable as MS pours in resources in research and development.
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Symbian and J2ME and CF. oh my.

Robert says

Having just started playing around the CF and especially the CF on the Smartphone 2003 platform, I'd have to say that this had better give a kick in the pants to the J2ME people. Having recently been looking at different mobile development technologies, the CF is much easier to get your app up and running in a small amount of time. I tried doing Symbian Dev C++ on my P800 and J2ME on the P800/Nokia 3650 only to be thwarted by frustration with the lack of well integrated tools. Setup's for each of the platforms were the worst ( with