Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Update: This info is also available on a web page.


JSR 248 Mobile Service Architecture can be seen as an evolutionary step from JSR 185 Java Technology for the Wireless Industry, further stretching the lowest common functionality denominator for mobile phones, with the intention to firm up the core feature set of mobile phones, and not the least making mobile application development a bit more predictable.

JTWI requires:

• JSR 30 Connected Limited Device Configuration 1.0
• JSR 118 Mobile Information Device Profile 2.0
• JSR 120 Wireless Messaging 1.1 (SMS)
• JSR 135 Mobile Media 1.1 (at least audio)

MSA adds a number of important features on top of that:

MSA Subset:

• JSR 139 CLDC 1.1 (adds floating point etc)
• JSR 118 MIDP 2.0
• JSR 75 File & PIM
• JSR 82 Bluetooth
• JSR 135 Mobile Media
• JSR 184 3D Graphics
• JSR 205 Messaging 2.0 (SMS and MMS)
• JSR 226 Vector Graphics (SVG)

Additionally in fully featured MSA:

• JSR 172 Web Services
• JSR 177 Security & Trust
• JSR 179 Location
• JSR 180 SIP (for VoIP, IMS etc)
• JSR 211 Content Handler
• JSR 229 Payment
• JSR 234 Multimedia Supplements
• JSR 238 Internationalization

Note the distinction between MSA and MSA Subset, as there's expected to be phones that won't support the full MSA feature set. I'd argue that 3D Graphics is a big leap in itself, much more so than Location and Web Services, but the specifiers might have realized that games contribute to almost all mobile phone application revenue.

Already MSA Subset is a big leap from JTWI, but as mobile phone technology evolves very fast , it's critical to push the envelope. Many phones already have at least what's in MSA Subset.