Bill Day's Blog

Developments in Nokia-land

Nokia's been making waves of late. In the last week it has:

• Announced the 6620, an American follow-on to the EMEA/Asia 6600 which among other things adds support for EDGE (significant speed improvement over GPRS) and doubles the onboard memory available for J2ME applications to 12MB
• Spoke of its intent to bring Perl to its Series 60 (Symbian) based devices
• Discussed plans to provide tiered developer support in an upcoming rev of its Forum Nokia developer program

Nokia is clearly attempting to raise the bar for its competitors. Whether the 6620 is "the" device or a precursor to it, I expect to see one or more very successful enterprise application handsets in 2004. I also expect to see scripting (Perl, Python, whatever) and easier to use J2ME tools enable Joe Average application creator to build wireless business apps. Coupled with these trends, we'll see competition between vendors' developer programs ramp up as enterprises finally begin to adopt wireless development in mass.

Thanks to Nokia, PalmOne, and others, 2004 is shaping up to be a very interesting year indeed!

Comments

• hmm
  Pleasant read as always Nill..

  But there are problems with Nokia series 60 at least with J2me MIDP2.0..

  so much that developers are getting very frustrated with Nokia..

  seems several methods that are not optional in midp 2.0 are not supported in series 60 in current implmenetations..

  How is SUN responding to this apparent problem?

  Yes its Nokia's problkem however did not USN certify the implmentation?

  which means the whole process of certification, jcp, and etc is falling down on the job..

  To be blunt us J2me developers do not want go through this every time a new version of MIDP comes out.. is there any way SUN can start a dialog with developers, j2me vendors, and device vendors to prevent this in the future?

  
  I will be at my blog listening..

  Posted by: shareme on January 24, 2004 at 04:35 AM

• RE: hmm (Nokia 6600 known issues, etc.)

  I've spoken with a Nokia colleague about the problems you mention. They are accutely aware of the pain this is causing developers. They've posted details in a Known Issues in the Nokia 6600 MIDP 2.0 implementation PDF to hopefully spare developers at least some of the headaches from these problems.

  Concerning the process in which implementations of JCP specs are tested:
  A Testing Compatibility Kit (TCK) is always provided to implementers, who in turn use the TCK to test the compability of their implementation. I don't know details on the test process and results used by Nokia, but I will investigate this further to see if there might be any omissions in the MIDP 2.0 TCK itself that need to be addressed.

  Meanwhile, I'm crossing my fingers that Nokia will be able to fix most of these issues in the 6620, but don't yet have access to one to test it. I'll post to java.net if and when I do get the chance to put a 6620 through its paces.
  

  Posted by: billday on January 24, 2004 at 01:45 PM

• Perl, or Python?

  As I noted in my blog above, The Register reported last week that Nokia would make Perl available on Series 60. Nokia now seems to be indicating that Python would be their first choice. And whatever Nokia decides to do, it looks like there are several third party choices available too (see Python story above).

  Whatever the language(s), expect to see scripting on a phone near you in the not too distant future.
  

  Posted by: billday on January 24, 2004 at 01:57 PM

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