iPhone with no Java support

What a pity! Besides its innovative innovative input solutions and futuristic look and feel the recently released iPhone by Apple lacks some features that many current phones offer by default. This is really annoying for such an expensive device of around 500 $ for the 4GB model. Some of these negative points are:

• No support for mobile Java applications
• No 3G wireless data connections possible
• Non-removable battery
• Closed platform, no SDK available
• Camera with only 2.0 megapixels
• iPhone activation is mandatory
  

For information on the iPhone, specs can be found here.

The JSR 281 IMS Services API

At this years JavaOne Conference a MIDlet was introduced that uses the new IP Multimedia Subsystem API (IMS). The goal of this API is to offer a standardized IP network infrastructure on which higher level services like voice and multimedia communication can be built. Operators that use this API can develop new mobile IP based services at lower costs. Users on the other hand can advantage of mobile P2P multimedia real-time communications. Possible promising fields of application are:

• instant picture sharing
• mobile-to-mobile video streaming
• networked-gaming
• enriched location based services
  

In general the JSR 281 is an API that allows MIDlets to be clients to IMS application servers and to realize mobile P2P services on the mobile device. The classes of this API offer functions to create session based IMS calls, to communicate with IMS application servers and to search for capablities of remote peers. The demonstrated IMS MIDlet showed how to use this API by presenting a MIDlet to exchange text and photos via the underlying SIP protocol. Because the final release of JSR 281 is scheduled for Q4 2007 we can anticipate new devices supporting this API in 2008.

P2P-Systems for Mobile Devices

P2P-systems are very important communication infrastructures in the internet. Mobile P2P-systems are still not common, but there exist some solutions to let mobile clients take part in them. No idea what P2P-systems for mobile systems could offer in the future? Think of mobile personalized collaborative services as recommendation systems and mobile distributed search services that can benefit from using P2P-technology. Some already existent solutions will now be introduced.

JXME

JXME is a framework to build J2ME-based P2P-applications, aimed at giving access to the JXTA network for connected devices with limited ressources as phones and PDAs. JXME-Peers run on devices supporting the MIDP 1.0, MIDP 2.0 and the CDC. They can participate in P2P-activities like peer- and content-search, P2P-communication, building of peer-groups and file transfer.

Jabber

Jabber clients for mobile devices as Bombus please many Instant-Messaging enthusiasts, as mobile users can be logged in to many IM-systems like ICQ, Yahoo! and MSN at the same time using the XML-based open source Jabber protocols. Mobile file transfer is also supported by some clients, e.g. the Bombusmod.

Gnutella and BitTorrent

Symella and SymTorrent are two great and free clients for connecting Symbian-based phones to the Gnutella- and BitTorrent-networks. While Symella does not allow the upload of files, SymTorrent implements this function. Their code is open source. Another very sophisticated BitTorrent-client for PocketPCs is WinMobile Torrent which even supports the creation of torrents in the application and runs very stable and fast.

Emule P2P-client for Pocket PCs

With MopiPhant the first working standalone Emule-client is available for PocketPCs since April 2005. Although this program is working pretty well, it seems that is is not developed any further.

My TOP 10 J2ME Applications

In my first post I would like to present my TOP 10 mobile Java applications, that I really like and would surely miss, if they would not be available anymore. The list starts with the MIDlet I use most often.

1. Opera Mini (The best J2ME-based Internet Browser)
2. Google Mail Mobile (Google Mail-client with a really pretty GUI)
3. Papla (Really nice Jabber-IM-client)
4. Google Maps (For viewing maps and route calculation)
5. WLIrc2 (The best mobile IRC-application which also supports DCC file transfer)
6. JIMM (Very functional ICQ-IM-client)
7. JumpRadioGuide (A MIDlet by the german radio station JUMP, for news and traffic infos)
8. RadioBee (Listen to internet radio stations on your phone)
9. ZelfiSMS (Program to send free SMS from germany, austria and switzerland)
10. MMail (A small email client with POP3/SMTP mail server support)
    

Hope you find these suggestions useful.