I want my mobile Java now - which Java devices come when
Wireless Java, i.e. the Java 2 Micro Edition, increasingly causes
excitement among application developers, device manufacturers and operators.
While at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes most device companies would not tell us exactly when they will deliver which devices to the market, CeBIT in Hannover is the event important enough to motivate the missing announcements.
Comparing the big four, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Siemens and Motorola, the Finnish
company clearly takes the lead in support of Java in their new devices. And
Nokia has announced to deliver 50 million Java-capable devices out of the roughly 400 million handsets that will be sold in 2002 on a global basis.
Nokia's Java phones are the 9210i, 7650 and 7210 with colour screens, and
the black and white 6310i and 3410. Unfortunately, the new communicator 9210i
still does not support GPRS which is something that I still don't understand. Given the fact that Nokia is by far the market leader in the mobile phone market it is understandable that they are serious about Java and speed up to deliver it to the market.
Sony Ericsson which definitely had the coolest stand at Cebit demoed 2 Java devices stemming from their joint development efforts. While the Z700 is quite cool and reminds of Sony's Z7, the P800 is the real killer device with big colour screen, Symbian OS 7.0 and 12 MB user memory. The P800 has the built-in camera like Nokia's 7650 but a bigger screen which is in fact a touch screen that supports recoginition of your handwriting. This will give me a hard time to decide between Nokia 7650 and Sony Ericsson P800.
Siemens only presented the Java-enabled M50 which is black and white and offers
just 228KB of user memory. The M50 is built for the mass market but does not
support a colour screen. As we all know the ultimate device mix is GPRS, Java
and colour screen. Building such a device for the mass market is the real challenge. If Siemens wants to increase their market share they need to put
more efforts in delivering cutting edge devices. The competition does not
sleep.
Finally, let's look at Motorola that is a very proud company as they demoed the first UMTS device for the German market. The A820 should be available some time
around September 2002 and is actually manufactured in Flensburg in the north of Germany. This device supports CSD GSM, GPRS and UMTS and is a triband device
working in North America and Europe. Of course, J2ME and WAP 2.0 are supported. The video cam is not built in but can be connected to the top of the phone.
With a price of 1200 Euro (before subsidy) the A820 is quite expensive but
offers a lot, too. Other J2ME devices from Motorola are the Accompli 008, the
V66i, the V60i and the T720 which is a flip phone with a nice colour screen.
At the same time we still wait for the first Java-enabled i-mode phones.
So if Java makes the difference and i-mode is slow in Germany to push
Java then other operators get the publicity and the Java-hungry customers.
Rereading the above, we count more than 10 Java-capable devices hitting
Germany in the second half of 2002. This means that there is quite some
work to do to adapt the MIDlet to each device. Write once and run anywhere
is something that does not hold true in the wireless world as devices and
J2ME implementations are too different, especially when it comes to Game APIs.
However, in the near future I will play around with my mobile java device
and that is something I am looking forward to.
