Remember back in the late 1990s when the 2-way pagers like the Motorola clamshell 2-way pager was all the rage? You used to see the alpha geeks with their 2-way pagers clipped to their belt buckles (usually in addition to a clunky analog cell phone they carried around with them).

See:

Obsolete Motorola 2-way pager

Now, everyone has SMS text-messaging on their cell phones and geeks all around the world have thrown away their text-only 2-way pagers, since cell phones can now do both voice calling and text messaging.

So, what other devices will cell phones suck up next? That large sucking sound you hear isn't what Ross Perot was referring to. The next generation Smartphones are sucking up functionality and other devices to make your pocket load lighter--for instance, next up: the iPod and then GameBoy. The dual-screen GameBoy and Sony PSP will give a go to try to keep the handheld game console market going. But, just like that Motorola clamshell 2-way pager, their days are numbered with Java on the high-end Smartphones.

J2ME technology will concentrate on high-end gaming (such as 3-D graphics gaming) and multi-media apps on the next gen cell phones. When that starts to catch on, stay out of the way of all those extra devices that people will begin throwing out. Six or seven years from now, iPods will go for $9 on eBay.

Hinkmond

Here's a review of the Sanyo Wipoq. It's a device that can utilize a Personal Mobile Gateway (like a mini-hub that connects personal devices to your wireless carrier but you carry it around with you) (PMG) if you have one, or it can use Bluetooth to your mobile phone with Lan Access Profile (LAP) and use it like a modem. The idea is to break up your personal devices into components (like a e-mailer, browser, camera, etc.) and have them each individually get to the network through your PMG (that acts like a mobile hub). That's a lot of stuff to carry in your pockets!

See:

The Register's Review of the Sanyo Wipoq

Anyway, the press announcement says it has a built-in Java browser. What the heck is a Java browser? A Web-browser written in the Java programming language? A Web-browser that only shows Java applets? A bunch of photos of cups of coffee you flip through? ;-) A bit ambiguous there. :-)

Hinkmond

Here's a review of the Motorola e680 from Howard Chui. It's a good write-up and talks in detail about the Linux Java phone that is found mainly in Asia.

See:

Howard Chui's review of the Linux J2ME Motorola e680

It's a cool phone but not meant for the amateur. It's really for the hardcore hacker that knows Linux and isn't afraid of installing drivers and using telnet with a limited set of shell commands. Then you can do something cool and install J2ME Personal Profile for Linux/ARM on it (not just use the J2ME MIDP that's on it by default).

Hinkmond

Sameer Bhatia of Octane Technologies says that writing portable J2ME games (which was a $1.2 billion industry last year and growing fast!) is hard work.

See:

Boo hoo. J2ME porting can be hard work.

He says one way to ease this problem is to outsource the work. Bzzzt. Wrong answer. Try again. Outsourcing J2ME games is cheap, but having in-house developers gives you faster turn-around time, better creative control, and ability to change anything in your software on a dime without a time-lag. You mitigate the complexity of all the different phones and environments you must port to, by using good engineering and tools like J2ME Polish (that's "polish" as in shining something by rubbing it). See Darryl Mocek's Weblog post about J2ME Polish

Sometimes the correct answer to a complex problem is a well-engineered architecture and a good set of tools. Outsourcing is the answer to simple problems that are routine and easy enough to have anyone do.

Hinkmond

Paris Hilton made the CBS News PC Answer Section of their Web page. There's mention of J2ME technology for her Danger Sidekick phone/PDA combo that she had hackers hack into back a month ago (Personally, I think it was probably an inside job at T-Mobile that had nothing to do with her phone).

See:

Paris in February

When it comes down to it, there's nothing like a little common sense for cell phone security, now that these high-end devices have much more of your personal info on them. Lock it with a password (all phones have this feature). And, turn-off Bluetooth when not using it. That's it. Simple. It's not J2ME technology or the phone system that makes the new generation of cell phones vulnerable. It's ditziness of not doing some simple things to make your data safe. Just like locking your car when you leave it in the mall parking lot. Paris should relate to that. :-)

Hinkmond

Here's an opinion piece by a North Carolinian (hmmm... Do Triangle Parkians know more about technology than Silicon Valleyians... er, Valleyiates, um, Valleyers. Perhaps... There's some smart people there. We'll see.), Joe Procopio, on how current technology is opening up new opportunities in emerging markets, like Security, Personal Music Players (like the iPod), and of course, Mobile Devices (the convergence of J2ME technology-enabled cell phones with PDA functionality).

See:

Perspective on emerging technologies

Here's an interesting quote from his Web post:

  Take a step past mobile phones, however, and you get Mobile Devices, 
  and it’s safe to say that this market has started to explode. 
  ...
  This is a great market. A ripe market. But it probably means we 
  have to start pretending like we’re going to learn Java again,

  ...
  Anyway, we need mobile business applications. By the truckload. 
  Forget about the racing games and Tetris and blackjack – well, 
  okay, keep blackjack – what we need are the convergence items, 
  the apps that bring to fruition the promise of those 
  IBM/Microsoft/SAP commercials. 

Ha! Entertainment apps like the one above (BTW, I've got first dibs on it), will be the driver of Mobile Devices. Who would resist downloading a game like that? ;-) You might need a 1GB SD card, but hey, they're only about 80 bucks now at Fry's Electronics. :-)

Hinkmond

Here's a Red Herring article on Mobile Java Gaming and how it's going from Time Killer games to Killer games.

See:

Article on Java Gaming for Cell Phones

The main points are that J2ME games on cell phones should not try to be a direct recreation of the PC or game console version of the games (especially because of reduced screen size and reduced avaialble time) when playing on a handheld. Instead, take avantage of the mobile network, phone cams, SMS, and GPS location abilities of the phone version of games. And distribute your game internationaly, since a bulk of mobile games players are in Asia and Europe.

Easy to say. I'd just like to see some more interesting use of graphics, even with the reduced screen size anyone (with minimal rudimentary graphics arts skills) can do much better than that original Nokia block snake game that came out about a ka-jillion years ago. :-) Oooo, watch out! Your snake is about to cross over it's tail! Oooo... (Hey, all I see are blocks on the screen!) ;-)

Hinkmond

Samsung announced their new J2ME phones at 3GSM World Congress. The SGH-Z130 is one schwe-e-eet phone! It's got a sch-winging screen that gives portrait or landscape mode.

See:

New Samsung J2ME phones

These phones pack J2ME MIDP 2.0 and 3G features like multimedia MP3 and video playback. Next gen after this set of phones, they'll need J2ME CDC to give some needed software flexibility and customization abilities. All in good time, though, all in good time. We should enjoy these new generation phones while we can. Things are moving along nicely.

Hinkmond

Music is the next big thing for cell phones. Sony Ericsson and Nokia are trying to turn your mobile phones into iPods. The new 3G networks will allow this to happen in a timely manner with good user experience for fast downloads.

See:

Music is the next big thing on J2ME phones

J2ME technology content provisioning running seamlessly in the background on your phone could be downloading your favorite songs while you sleep.

Hinkmond

Danger sees the light and gets some new-found J2ME religion. Their version of software for their Hiptop wireless device just passed compatibility tests for J2ME MIDP.

See:

Danger Hiptop wireless device passes J2ME tests

Sure took them long enough! Of course now they get all the benefits of Java technology on their device: loads of legacy J2ME games, new generation of fun apps, and lots of Java programmers. Do you think Paris Hilton or Ashton Kutcher (two famous users of the Danger Hiptop PDA) will care? Of course! :-) It's all about the games they can play while attending the awards shows. ;-)

Hinkmond

Here's the new J2ME cell phone Game of the Year 2005: Worms Forts - an action/strategy game based on the console/PC game of the same name. You command a squad of 4 worms to go around blasting away opponents.

See:

New Game of the Year 2005: Worms Fort

The game looks pretty funny! The worms you command are happy looking pink blobs on the screen going around blasting stuff. The kind of thing anyone would want to do but normally would not think of doing standing in line at the supermarket check-out line. :-)

Hinkmond

It's becoming evident that massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft (free registration for NY Times article) are becoming drivers of the gaming industry. Now they are moving to J2ME technology-enabled cell phones too.

One example is Pocket Kingdom on the Nokia (Dis) N-gage.

See:

Web Article on Massively Multiplayer: Pocket Kingdom

The trick will be to allow the players to keep playtime to short bursts (a few minutes) for the mobile players, so they can catch snippets of online play while staying in line or waiting around. The J2ME cell phone is not the platform to use to play for hours. Keep your online games short, sweet, and lots of fun and they will be automatic hits.

Hinkmond

This is a story from last October about a church in Mexico installing a cell phone jammer because it was tired of its parishoners getting calls during the middle of services.

See:

Jammin' in the name of the Lord

Now if they had put their cell phones on vibrate mode and used J2ME technology instant messaging, they could have been inconspicuously IM chatting away with their Java-enabled cell phones with their hands on their laps looking like they were deep in prayer. But, noooo... they didn't think of that and thus... There's jammin', jammin' in the name of the Lord (apologies to Bob Marley). ;-)

Hinkmond

A lot of overworry is being thrown around on hackers targetting mobile phones. It's good to be paranoid about it, but you also have to look at the realities too.

See:

Security on Mobile Phones Article

Because there is such a wide a variety of operating systems, software implementations and native environments (CPUs, memory size, code installed, etc.) for mobile phones versus the Windows/x86 monopoly on PCs, you will find that any virus, spyware, spam or other ways of hacking into a phone will be limited to a small segment of phones (like just Symbian OS phones, or a certain version of Bluetooth left wide open).

That will mean those types of hacks will die off quickly (without numerous homogenous hosts to attack), just like real viruses in the biology. So, by the very nature of having large diversity in the mobile phone population, the threat of hacking is valid, but maybe overblown.

Hinkmond

BuinessWeek has a good article about Nokia's plans to respark it's market lead in cell phones. Their plans relate a lot to what's going to happen with J2ME CDC technology on cell phones.

See:

Business Week Nokia Article (free registration required)

The interesting part to note is at the end in the "HIGH-SPEED CUSTOMIZATION" section, where Nokia says they want to be able to build cell phones with "modular hardware" and "flexible software" in small batches to allow for highly customizable small runs of these fun (and expensive) phones.

Of course, these new customized cell phones have to be designed and manufactured in a very short amount of time, since there will be short and specialized production runs instead of long high-volume production runs. But the margins will be much better. So the logical choice is to base the platform on J2ME CDC technology (evolution of the J2ME CLDC/MIDP platform), to allow for modular software building blocks ("flexible software") to be installed on the phone, which makes the assembly highly customizable (for example, putting database accessing and instant messaging on an enterprise-style phone, and MP3 player and streaming video on a consumer-style phone).

Smart plans to be a flexible software assembler, but as long as they start with J2ME CDC technology as the core they'll do just fine.

Hinkmond