Tag: J2ME

Qualcomm slowly admitting defeat?

On 18/05/2009

I know this is a contentious headline but one could interpret the news that Qualcomm is opening its very own app store (which is probably the oldest one!) to any device on any platform on any carrier this way. The provider will open its Plaza service to non-BREW devices (BREW is proprietary to Qualcomm). This could be seen as an admission of defeat in the platform war, which it appears to be losing against GSM platforms.

However, I plead to see the bright side of this: it is a remarkable move to highlight and capitalize on a piece in its arsenal that has long been industry-leading: Qualcomm has long been offering merchandising solutions that do not have to shy away of the cutting-edge app stores of today. The new Plaza Retail will now bring to Java, BREW, Blackberry and Flash (Android , Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and Linux Mobile are apparently to follow) what BREW users have had for a while: a storefront, great device integration and flexible billing (micro-billing, subscriptions, etc). It also allows personalization and a recommendation engine (courtesy of last year’s acquisition of Xiam Technologies). And it is a very proven platform that has showed its worth on many a bill to developers (the content-lock is much better than Apples; which may anger some users but will be welcomed by developers) This is quite cool!

JavaFX: and another one…

By Volker

On 13/02/2009

Whoever had hoped that the iPhone example would trigger an end of the fragmentation will be disappointed. Android will likely come in infinite flavours as and when OEMs and carriers adapt the OS to their specific tastes (I dare not speak of needs…), Symbian when going open-source will likely fare a similar fate, and now Sun fights back to maintain its stronghold by launching JavaFX, which is supposed to provide a bit of zing to the ubiquitous J2ME middleware that dominates the mobile handsets (according to Sun, 2.6bn devices carry it).

It’s early days but I will make sure quizzing our engineers to see what they think.

And now let’s go back to dream of a single platform… Zzzzzzzz.

AT&T to go all Symbian

By Volker

On 08/12/2008

An article tells us that AT&T Wireless intends to run all their phones on one platform as soon as 2014, namely on Symbian. Is this odd? I mean: the iPhone isn’t Symbian, is it?

It is of course not odd. The carrier wants to avoid platform fragmentation (see also here and here) which has made it hard to develop mobile applications (and one might well now think that they indeed had a very powerful showcase paraded past them over the last 5 months: see here), and their Director of Next Generation Services, Data Product Realization (can’t they have shorter job titles?), Roger Smith called Symbian “a very credible and likely candidate” to be “the One”.

AT&T intends to

provide an own-branded smartphones and they reckon – rightly! – that it would be a “support nightmare” would they run this on various platforms.

Mr Smith also came up with some damning verdicts about J2ME: it failed to deliver a simplification for application developers and, moreover, doesn’t allow developers to get deeply enough into a phone’s OS to deliver the kind of experiences consumers want (what are these, I ask? Not having to put up with clunky and unintuitive restrictions? Ah, now I get it).

Symbian, Android (see here) or another one: the path is, I reckon, the right one. And it is a milestone for Symbian (and one probably only possible because of the decision to go open source with it) as it would wrap up one of the largest carriers in the world under its wings.

Re Tira: there are others!

By Volker

On 10/09/2008

My post on Tira Wireless‘ apparent demise triggered a few e-mails, and it was pointed out that, whilst my observations generally seem to have been accurate, I forgot a few players that actually do deliver porting solutions across platforms (e.g. from J2ME to BREW) rather successfully (and do work with some of the larger publishers, too). There is for instance Innaworks, whose Alchemo solution is pretty powerful.

So, I stand corrected: it is actually possible to ease porting nightmares with smart transcoding solutions. I would still maintain though that porting from a single J2ME build (rather than a reference code base) to all devices under the sun is only possible with severe constraints. If that is understood though, the likes of Innaworks and Metismo provide a great ease of pain!

Sony Ericsson marries J2ME with Flash

By Volker

On 30/04/2008

Sony Ericsson announced that it would release a new technology that would basically marry Flash Lite with J2ME. The new technology and tools, referred to as “Project Capuchin” make, it says, it possible to “combine the richness of Flash and J2ME technologies allowing developers to utilize the best attributes of both software stacks to create content-rich mobile applications”. Sony Ericsson wants to launch this in H2/2008 and will demonstrate apps running under this at JavaOne in SF next week.

The concept is pretty cool: the thing is said to allow pure Flash Lite content to be encapsulated in J2ME applications, making content created in Flash appear as Java apps. It goes on to say that “more advanced capabilities will allow FlashLite technology to handle an entire presentation layer and make it possible to create Java ME applications where some or all UI components are defined in Flash.”

I have reported a little on Flash Lite and its moves into the markets in the past (see e.g. here and here). One obstacle always was the device footprint. If you can make a Flash app appear to be a Java one, this gap would appear to be immediately reduced to, yes, zilch, zero, naught, nothing at all. So this would bring us the slick UI and interfaces we all so love from the Flash world to all the Java-enabled phones immediately.

What I would really like to know though is what the porting would be: would one be able to address everything in one build, Flash graphics being vector-based and all and therefore automatically adaptable to all screen sizes? That would be a real killer. I’m thrilled…

News Flash (Lite)

By Volker

On 18/01/2008

A while ago, I blogged about a cool new site French company Mobitween had launched, namely on user-generated games. Now, the good folks are a bridgehead in mobile Flash (they had their fingers in the code more or less from day 1). So, where is Flash Lite today?

Here’s the install base numbers as recently released:

From just over 14% to 23% in a year (yes, I know, this is based on a flat 2 bn handsets out there)… In any event, that is rather respectable, don’t you think?

Flash has the great advantage that its graphics are vector-based and therefore scalable. This means that most of the porting nightmare that contributes to 30-50% of the cost of mobile games, etc would fall away. Nice thought… It would make the whole commercial model of mobile games dramatically rosier. And it appears to be gaining traction: e.g. does Adobe make Flash Lite available on Verizon phones (and I’ve been told – confidentially – of one publisher having recorded more than 2m Flash game downloads on there already).

Flash is particularly good for casual games, which is, as everyone close(-ish) to mobile games knows, all the hype for the (small) mobile screen, and rightly so, as it is normally easier to adapt a casual game to the screen limitations (not even starting to talk about processing power) that are inherent to mobile phones. A natural fit, huh? Just look what Mobitween and their users have come up with! And I don’t even get started on Atom/Shockwave (read an interview here) and all the others out there…

Is it then that we only need to wait until Flash Lite (finally) reaches the mass market? On the web, Flash hurt Sun‘s Java badly. Will the same happen on mobile? Or will Sun be smarter this time, and make sure that its currently dominant position will be reinforced by making it easier for developers to publish on their platform? The jury is out…