Friday July 15, 2005 CNET writes once, spreads fear uncertainty and doubt everywhere
CNET has an article that the Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) concept is not working for Java ME on cell phones. See: Java ME WORA not working on cell phones There's a definite bias to the article concentrating on the Java ME technology as the cause of WORA not working, with just a small mention of the cause being due to the disparate hardware of all cell phones in the world. However, the problems are really mainly caused by the differences in hardware. That's one thing CNET doesn't get right. If you look at the PC world, you see just one hardware architecture: Intel based x86 with Microsoft based Windows operating system (from this other single H/W standards spawn out such as XVGA, PCI, ISA, ATA, USB, Firewire etc., etc.). For cell phones you have different CPUs, different screen resolutions, different operating systems, different keypad softkeys, different everything). Any software, not just Java ME technology would have problems with that mess. The key is to unify (and commoditize the hardware) of a cell phone into 3 standard H/W profiles: high volume, smartphone, and enterprise phone. Only then will you get Java ME technology able to give the developer WORA. You'll notice that Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, etc. will blame the Java ME technology, though. Get Taiwan or China to churn out billions of cheap commodity standard clone cell phones, and you'll see Java ME really give software developers an awesome homogenous programming environment that kicks butt. This is the dirty secret cell phone industrusty doesn't want you to know. They instead want hardware lock-in to their specific (profitable for them) hardware. Don't let them fool you. Recipe for success: Clone it cheap, slap on standard embedded Linux and Java ME software, make millions in cell phones. |
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