Here's a good article on J2ME technology in Java Developers Journal written by Calvin Austin. He does a nice job summarizing J2ME in a good introductory article.

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J2ME Article

Calvin has a good blog over at Calvin and Blogs.

Bill Gates got the Blue Screen of Death during his demo of Microsoft products at the CES conference currently happening in Las Vegas. (Just noticed this: Also see The Sect of Rama blog post today).

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Don't Trust This Man with your Consumer Electronics

I would not trust Micro$oft with any electronic consumer device, especially my cell phone. If they're getting the Blue Screen of Death during an important demo in front of over 100,000+ people, there is something seriously wrong with their engineering.

Java technology (especially the memory management part of Java programming) on consumer devices is more important now than ever. Watch out when Micro$oft engineers try applying their Yeah-I'm-Used-To-1GB-of-RAM-So-What? mentality to electronic devices instead of their loaded PCs. They'll be scratching their heads wondering what's going wrong for quite some time to come. They just don't understand what Java and J2ME technology has already addressed, especially in places where it is really easy to get "Out of Memory".

Super 3G is the next generation of wireless data service network being developed by the big cell phone carriers to leapfrog over the still-in-development 3G service.

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Super 3G

Kind of putting the cart before the horse. Carriers should be instead be thinking of how to drive more data usage on the current 3G network deployments instead of thinking too far ahead for 10x speed improvement over 3G. J2ME multiplayer/online games and streaming video could be the drivers for 3G and Super 3G, but not without help. The 3G/Super 3G carriers can potentially get caught with overcapicity (like the telcos with all the optical networks build-outs in the late 1990s) and go bust. So, when was the last time you looked at streaming video on your cell phone? It ain't happening a lot, even on fully deployed 3G networks. Voice and text messaging are still king and that doesn't need 3G nor Super 3G to do.

The wireless carriers better invest more in J2ME and video content (in order to make these big fat pipe wireless networks get properly utilized) or they'll meet the same fate as WorldCom, Nortel, and others.

One thing to note from the Tsunami Disaster regarding J2ME and cell phone techology: In this article people in Sri Lanka found they could not make calls on their cell phones but they could send and receive SMS text messages from their cell phones.

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Tsunami Disaster Cell Phone Lessons

A good design would be to use J2ME technology as the layer on top of the SMS text layer for data transport. This way, portable J2ME MIDlets can be used as international warning monitor programs on any cell phone (which are very widespread worldwide), listening for SMS data that could announce disaster warnings (like tsunami warnings).

You can now study for the SAT-ACT PSAT 2005 test using a J2ME Mobile app from Handmark and Kaplan. The J2ME app allows you to read about test strategies, practice with sample questions and a play a test preparation game against friends head-to-head.

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J2ME SAT/ACT Test Preparation App

Jeez! If I had this when I studied for the SATs (back 100 years ago), it would have been a lot more fun than memorizing vocabulary words. What the heck does "obstreperous" mean again? ;-)