Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

The PDA API is used for accessing PIM data as well as the file system from MIDlets. I believe all phones released this and last year has it, if they at all support MIDlets. See the J2ME Polish' API/JSR directory for all phones supporting it.

Enrique Ortiz has recently published informative and hands-on articles on the PIM API subset. There will be six such articles in total. I will add them as they are published here.

• Part 1 - Managing Personal Information
• Part 2 - Portability Considerations
• Part 3 - Security Considerations
• Part 4 - Design Considerations
• Part 5 - Data Management
• Part 6 - TBA

An issue seldomly mentioned about the PDA API, which is covered in part 3, is that in uncertified applications you can typically not shut off the security reminders you get for each and every access to the API. That can completely kill the user experience. On a farly new phone like the Sony Ericsson M600i I can only select 'Always Ask' or 'Don't Allow', and according to the MIDP 2.0 specification, that's maximum what you are supposed to get. I have argued before that asking all these questions doesn't really make the solution more secure, it only pisses the user off.