The Planetarium

One of a couple of interesting new articles remind many of us that we are a bit spoiled when our biggest worries are how long it takes to download movies over our broadband connection, and whether $179 for a handset is a luxury we can afford.

If you're an application developer wondering how to reach the next billion users you might look towards Africa (rather than rather than sit in your living room wondering...), where the number of Java enabled phones is projected to overtake that of North America in 2010.

This article describes what kinds of things they care about. Less scarcity of rollover minutes than scarcity of electrical power. Less whether the 3G is spotty on the drive to work, than being able to use SMS as a data bearer when GPRS or other data connections are not working.

The other article (part 1 and part 2) is a hands on description on how to use SIP in Java ME. SIP is for setting up all kinds of multi-party sessions and is supported in Java ME. It's good for anything from simple chat applications, as shown in the GoSIP sample in the Sun Wireless Toolkit, to VoIP applications where multiple users can conference in.