“SavaJe, a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, threw its hat into the ring at the 2006 JavaOne Conference in San Francisco this week, with the unveiling of a ‘sophisticated’ handset that runs a unique, Java-centric operating system. The Jasper S20 mobile phone, running SavaJe’s Java-based SavaJe Mobile Platform, also garnered JavaOne’s ‘Device of the Show’ honors. But why create a Java-based phone OS, when the mid- and high-tier mobile phone market appears to be locked in a three-way battle among Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux?”
Well, answer may be:
– there are already tons of Java applications.
– it is easier to maintain-improve a (mostly) java based OS then a C or C++ one.
(an irrelevant note: OSNews web site is givin a lot of “It appears our database has momentarily gone down.” messages recently.)
> OSNews web site is givin a lot of “It appears our
> database has momentarily gone down. …
It happens to me on average 5 times a day.
This has the worst uptime among the websites I visit often.
http://www.internetnews.com/wireless/article.php/3073131 suggests that the “unique” Java OS smartphone has been around for a couple of years.
Guess there really is nothing new under the sun.
Despite all the noise from Sun, Nokia, Motorola, all our phones will end up running Windows because only Microsoft will throw everything at it.
Do you see any advertising for any of these phones ? Microsoft is out on billboards in the uk in a big way. The market share is getting fought for now not in a couple of years
It’s already been fought, they’ve lost. The single most prolific mobile phone OS right now is Symbian. They have 90%+ of the smartphone market.
MS wants people to say, I’ve a “Windows Phone”, hence the adverts. The difference is Symbian realise they are only part of the overall solution (nee stack). They never have spent money on advertising to joe consume. It’s not the consumer who actually buys most of the phones, it’s the network operator. They buy the phones, they choose which ones Joe Public can get on their networks.
The network operator want you to say you’ve got an “Orange Phone”, not a “Windows Phone”.
Symbian as the first entrant into the Smartphone market (Anyone remember the R380?) realise that they won’t hold as much of this market share as they would like too, sure as the smartphone market increases there will be space for competitors. It’s this additional space which MS is fighting for, it’s between MS, SavaJe, and Linux. But for the next 5->7 years, it’s going to be Symbian as the dominant OS.
— sorry for double post.
Edited 2006-05-19 11:47
Simple. I had contact with SavaJe about two years ago. Vodafone, T-Mobile, etc are really annoyed at how much control Nokia / Symbian have over the handset market. Vodafone would love to you to I have a Vodafone phone, not a Nokia or motorola handset. They want to own the device. That way they can brand it with their own data content / adverts etc. At the moment they only get a little bit of customisation.
But having a Java OS that they can drop on just about any hardware means that t-mobile for instance could simply go to a hardware maker and ask for “a phone”, then go to SavaJe and ask for the OS… in the words of Lou Gerstner in “Who says Elephants Can’t Dance” it’s all about breaking up the ‘stack’.