Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Trend spotting: Java in mobile phones
Update: I strenghtened the confidence in the text, as this is not guesswork.
For a better understanding of the text, there are two configurations of Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME): CLDC and CDC, with a range of profiles. The most popular and relevant combinations for mobile phones are CLDC / MIDP and CDC / Personal Profile. MIDP is completely dominating among the two, and also dominating overall. Sun officially claims 1.5 billion mobile phones support Java ME, and almost all of those support MIDP. In comparison there are ~100 million Symbian OS phones (mostly Series 60), that all also support MIDP. For more on Java ME for mobile phones see my Java ME pages.
Trends and observations:
* MIDlets are increasingly integrated into phones and hence shipped with the phones. Mainly games of course, but also messaging, social networking and productivity applications. These applications are typically picked among the top applications already available on the market, hence cutting lead time considerably, providing solutions for the current market and getting very high quality. This trend also applies to Symbian OS.
* The quality of fully embedded applications, especially when looking at new types of applications, are going down (very expensive to develop and maintain), and the quality of the most popular MIDlets are going up, even further fuelling the above trend.
* Increasingly MIDP is also used for developing new applications for embedded use only. The advantages are: much easier to find developers fluent in Java than a proprietary phone platform, easier to deploy on many different handsets (even with differing platforms), easier to test in the field (could be downloaded to the handsets) etc.
* MIDP3 will replace MIDP2. CDC/PP will not. Reasons: MIDP3 is backwards compatible with MIDP2, which is crucial for the application developers and the phone market, and MIDP3 is optimized for mainstream phones, which CDC/PP is not. CDC/PP is optimized for smartphones, but almost all smartphones are based on Symbian OS, so why develop for CDC/PP (except in cases corporate applications)? There are currently only 3 commercial phones on the market with CDC/PP. Also, SavaJe is gone.
* Application developers, especially those of games but also applications, will continue to develop for MIDP1 as long as many phones still only have MIDP1. MIDP1 is also sufficient for many productivity and corporate applications. It's likely corporate applications will mainly be developed for MIDP2, as companies tend to use later phones.
* More and more applications are developed using any of the porting/de-fragmentation tools as a base. Sun doesn't effectively resolve the fragmentation issues, but third-party are.
For a better understanding of the text, there are two configurations of Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME): CLDC and CDC, with a range of profiles. The most popular and relevant combinations for mobile phones are CLDC / MIDP and CDC / Personal Profile. MIDP is completely dominating among the two, and also dominating overall. Sun officially claims 1.5 billion mobile phones support Java ME, and almost all of those support MIDP. In comparison there are ~100 million Symbian OS phones (mostly Series 60), that all also support MIDP. For more on Java ME for mobile phones see my Java ME pages.
Trends and observations:
* MIDlets are increasingly integrated into phones and hence shipped with the phones. Mainly games of course, but also messaging, social networking and productivity applications. These applications are typically picked among the top applications already available on the market, hence cutting lead time considerably, providing solutions for the current market and getting very high quality. This trend also applies to Symbian OS.
* The quality of fully embedded applications, especially when looking at new types of applications, are going down (very expensive to develop and maintain), and the quality of the most popular MIDlets are going up, even further fuelling the above trend.
* Increasingly MIDP is also used for developing new applications for embedded use only. The advantages are: much easier to find developers fluent in Java than a proprietary phone platform, easier to deploy on many different handsets (even with differing platforms), easier to test in the field (could be downloaded to the handsets) etc.
* MIDP3 will replace MIDP2. CDC/PP will not. Reasons: MIDP3 is backwards compatible with MIDP2, which is crucial for the application developers and the phone market, and MIDP3 is optimized for mainstream phones, which CDC/PP is not. CDC/PP is optimized for smartphones, but almost all smartphones are based on Symbian OS, so why develop for CDC/PP (except in cases corporate applications)? There are currently only 3 commercial phones on the market with CDC/PP. Also, SavaJe is gone.
* Application developers, especially those of games but also applications, will continue to develop for MIDP1 as long as many phones still only have MIDP1. MIDP1 is also sufficient for many productivity and corporate applications. It's likely corporate applications will mainly be developed for MIDP2, as companies tend to use later phones.
* More and more applications are developed using any of the porting/de-fragmentation tools as a base. Sun doesn't effectively resolve the fragmentation issues, but third-party are.
