Sun and Texas Instruments Team Up For Mobile Java
Among the things that made Qualcomm’s BREW and Openwave’s UP browsers so successful with respect to carrier adoption, one of the most powerful was the argument of “It’s already in the phone.” These companies could convince carriers to deploy their complete solutions because they had already provided the phone portion free of charge and on a vast number of shipped units. Sun Microsystems is finally cottoning onto this strategy, and the Sun Partnership to bundle J2ME MIDP 2.0 functionality with some TI mobile chips. This will make it easy for phone manufacturers to build phones with J2ME functionality, and will set a de facto functionality standard across the market. The development is reminiscent of CDMA chipmaker Qualcomm’s successful strategy to put BREW close to the silicon in its chips. Aside from increased functionality and wider market penetration, having the Virtual Machine environment run closer to the metal provides faster performance for running applets.
