Will Sun be a competitor in the future?

Posted by Stefan on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 1:12 am under Ideas and rants

I just finished reading this article over at Device Forge and it got me thinking: Can Sun really pull it off?

I use 3 applications everyday, none of them are written for S60.

Opera Mini = Java

Gmail = Java

Google Maps = Java

Technically I could switch to S40 and still be a happy guy. Java applications are popular amongst developers since they run on any Java enabled phone. Problem is the current mobile Java specification is so fragmented that code needs to be maintained for a multitude of devices. Any benefits that were gained and now instantly negated.

Flash Lite 3.0 is supposed to bring similar "write once, run on many," functionality, but it’s too early to tell.

Sun is coming out of no where with this. They want to write a mobile OS in Java? Madness.

I’m looking forward to seeing a demo. They are one of the most underrated companies out there. Lots of talent, but they think too far ahead into the future. They thought up the concept of applications in the cloud, but delivered it way too early and performance was miserable. I wish them the best of luck in the mobile phone arena. We can all learn from each other.

Their CEO writes a public blog. What about you OPK? We all know you blog on the Nokia intranet, how about exposing your thoughts to the world?


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    • 5 Responses to “Will Sun be a competitor in the future?”

    • Jurjen says:
      April 13th, 2007 at 2:42 am

      There is already a mobile OS based on JAVA. The blackberry OS is JAVA based, so it is possible!

    • Stefan Constantinescu says:
      April 13th, 2007 at 2:44 am

      Is it really?

      I can’t find this information.

    • Leonard says:
      April 13th, 2007 at 9:30 am

      There’s another one also-SavaJe.

    • JC says:
      April 13th, 2007 at 5:30 pm

      The thing that kills me is, with my WM device I use a lot more native applications than with my S60 device. Google Maps is a good example, it’s native with WinMo, and J2ME for Symbian.

      I hate to say it, but I think this is a trend. S60 development is so onerous that most companies are saying screw it, and developing J2ME versions of their software to cover S60 phones.

    • geek says:
      April 14th, 2007 at 12:33 am

      Yep. That’s the word for S60 development: onerous.

      IMHO, incremental change with Symbian/S60 just won’t cut it to take phones to the next level. I’d love to see Sun make a run at this. I don’t think they will though.

      Perhaps IBM, HP or Google will come out with a linux phone. I can dream I suppose.

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