How successful is mobile Java? Everybody will have to agree that you hardly see any mobile Java applications. You will see far more Symbian applications than mobile Java application. This is in contrary to Nokia, the largest player who has outshipped the entire PC industry by a factor of close to three, delivering 153 million mobile phones to consumers in the first half of this year. What went wrong?
According to Nokia, “What happened is that in the early days of J2ME we had MIDP and a bunch of different APIs, but nobody defined a framework that every handset should support. A lot of handsets offered MIDP support, but what additional APIs were supported varied between different operators and different handset manufacturers.” This is no surprise in an industry where APIs go through cycles of consolidation from day one they are published. The solution is naturally another consolidation, this time under the name of Mobile Service Architecture, or MSA.