To: James Connolly who wrote (7737 ) 5/6/2000 2:14:00 PM From: James Connolly Respond to of 10309
The white paper gives an excellent insight into WIND and the wireless Internet. In particular the Java connection and WIND's view of Symbian. On the face of it, it looks like WIND has a well thought out strategy going forward. WIND gets more interesting by the day !!! Regards JC.Java. "Sun has worked closely with NTTDoCoMo in Japan, as well as leading mobile phone OEMs such as Motorola, Siemens and Nokia, to develop a configuration specification for mobile phones. The configuration specification is known as the Connected, Limited Device Configuration (CLDC), and the associated profile is known as the Mobile Information Device (MID) Profile. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is watching closely. It is likely that the specification will become part of the Mobile Station Application Execution Environment (MExE) specification for application delivery on next generation mobile terminals. The intent of the MID Profile was to fine-tune the API?s requirement to support Java on handsets, pagers, and PDAs. The MID Profile was based on the JavaPhone, Java Telephony API, and Mobile Network Computer Reference (MNCR) specifications, which were developed for the PersonalJava? platform, and thus too large. The new spec better represents the requirements for "state of the art" wireless APIs, such as a display toolkit for limited size and depth displays, user input methods, persistent storage, messaging, networking, security, and wireless telephony. Mobile phone OEMs see the potential of using Java to access millions of mobile Internet applications through the J2ME architecture. It lets them leverage their manufacturing capability, rather than trying to rally application developers around a proprietary architecture. The attraction of the KVM is that it is scalable to both high and low-end phones. It also provides a means to build and securely deploy new applications and dynamic, interactive content to cell phones and mobile devices" Symbian. The Consortium?s Fallacy In the wireless industry, in-house operating systems have proliferated from the early days of the voice-only mobile phone. Rather than rely on commercial off-the-shelf solutions (often targeted at broad horizontal real-time applications), in-house operating systems have been tightly focused on the task at hand. While it was necessary in the beginning, companies have relied too long on in-house development ? a waste of resources and lost time-to-market. In-house solutions have proven ill-suited to the changing requirements and new processor architectures that have evolved since 1992. This has resulted in a multitude of in-house designs and incompatible code bases to support. Some of the larger OEMs have had over a dozen in-house kernels to support. Many have realized that it is time for this approach to end. It is difficult to tell if the mobile operating system consortium launched two years ago was born from a management reaction to the software crisis, if it was a plan to create third-party developer momentum, or if it was a marketing campaign to hype market awareness. While the best technology does not always win in the market, the consortium approach is often one of the worst ways to go forward. The consortium?s solution falls well short of meeting the mobile Internet?s requirements in the critical areas of real-time deterministic performance and small footprint. Perhaps the consortium believed that next generation mobile handsets would have greater application requirements and need the support of third party developers like desktop programmers. In this case, a good API and a third-party developer program would naturally have been attractive. Unfortunately, the need for third party developers is limited in next generation devices, because the mobile Internet business model depends on content and connectivity via technologies such as WAP and K-Java, not proprietary third-party applications. The Microsoft and Netscape browser war made this point clear. What OEMs need is not an organizer operating system, but a core real-time foundation and solid development tools so that they and their third-party partners can build next generation devices ? a whole range of them ? quickly and easily. A Java virtual machine on these devices will allow third party developers to create a wealth of mobile applications. On reflection, with regard to why the mobile operation system consortium was born, the marketing ploy seems the most likely explanation. And in terms of raising awareness of mobile Internet opportunities, its efforts have paid off.