To J2ME or not to J2ME - that is the question

Wireless application platforms, Financial Times, 20/11/2002

Wireless applications, from simple games to sophisticated business solutions, need a platform to run on - a software system that interprets the application instructions, and tells the device how to execute them.

For application developers, the more standardised that platform can be, the better, because it means they can address a larger market with lower development costs.

But a series of rival platforms and standards is making life difficult for the first mobile internet application developers.

The current market leader is a flavour of Sun Microsystems' Java programming language, Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition or J2ME.

Almost every major handset maker, including market leader Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Samsung, Matsushita, and NEC, has announced support for J2ME. "A very big majority of our new models will have Java," says Sami Inkinen, vice-president at Nokia Mobile Software.

Mobile operators in Asia, including Japan's NTT DoCoMo, have been selling Java handsets for some time, with 14m sold last year, according to Sun's figures. In Europe, operators are also starting to offer games, with O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange all launching major J2ME game download services within the past three months.

One of Java's key attractions is that a Java application should run on any Java-enabled device, with little or no recoding.

As Ken Thexton, O2's chief marketing and data officer, explains, "If you're trying to develop something different for every handset the cost of maintaining and developing it would be unsupportable."

But a J2ME program does need a fair amount of adjustment before it will run on different handsets. "No application platform can deliver genuine 'write-once, run anywhere' functionality," concedes Andy Bush, Sun's new technologies manager. "What we aim for is a 'common code base' - 90 to 95 per cent of the application code can be reused, and the only adjustments you need are for things like different screen sizes, or radio interfaces."

However, most mobile Java platforms have diverted from the basic J2ME standard, Mobile Independent Device Profile, or MIDP 1.0 - and the more they divert from the standard, the more recoding each game needs.

NTT DoCoMo rolled out its first Java service, iAppli, in January 2001 using a proprietary version of Java called DoCoMo Java or DoJa. Likewise, Vodafone has built a set of non-standard extensions to its Java games platform, launched in October 2002, which manage extra features such as the battery vibrating during a game.

Complete standardisation may not even be in the operator's interests. "If you only have a set of standard features then it is very hard to differentiate your services from the competition," says Tim Harrison, head of games at Vodafone Content Services.

"Java is as close to an industry standard as we are going to get," he adds. "But there will be compatibility issues that will make it interesting in the early days."

J2ME has already achieved very widespread acceptance as an platform for running simple games, which users can download for free, or as much as £5.

The projected revenues for Java games are significant - O, for example, predicts that game downloads will earn it £800,000 in net profit every month by mid 2003.

But operators need a platform that will go beyond simple games, to sophisticated business applications, such as wireless e-mail or CRM.

One of the main rivals to J2ME is Qualcomm's Brew (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless). Brew offers an end-to-end solution, handling the entire system from the handset software to downloading or "provisioning" to billing. As with J2ME, downloading games is easy for the user.

Brew also has a different business model, with San Diego-based Qualcomm charging royalties to operators and passing a share on to application developers.

Thus far, however, Brew adoption has mainly been restricted to the US and Asia, and networks using the CDMA standard. Announced customers include Verizon Wireless in the US, KTF in Korea, KDDI in Japan and China Unicom. But the technology has yet to make headway in the European market where the GSM standard prevails.

The other alternative is to write applications directly or "natively" for the operating system of the device they are intended to run on, be it the Symbian OS, or Palm OS, or a version of Microsoft's Windows CE.

This approach has advantages and disadvantages compared with systems such as J2ME and Brew. "Applications written natively will be the ones that give the 'wow factor'. They will be the ones that really get the most out of the device's capability. But they will tend to be too large to download over the air," says Steven Hartley, a consultant at ARC Group, a UK based telecoms consultancy.

While the market waits for a clear platform leader to emerge, devices supporting multiple application platforms are likely to offer the best solution. Handsets supporting J2ME alongside Brew or Microsoft operating systems are already appearing.

The multi-platform approach has also been adopted by Korea's SK Telecom, which launched games downloading in May 2001 as part of its multi-access internet portal, Nate. Initially it used a proprietary platform called GVM for game downloading but in 2001 it launched a Java-based platform as well, and the two now run side by side on some 3.6m handsets.

"We thought the GVM would be an interim solution. But it's cheap, simple and easy to put on a handset, so we keep it for the simple applications and use Java for bigger applications," says SK Telecom.

Different platforms will suit different applications - J2ME may prove the most popular solution for mass-market, downloadable games, while e-mail client software may work best when written in native code.

But ultimately, the customer will be persuaded not by technology, but by interesting, easy to use entertainment content or productive business applications.

Application developers, meanwhile, want to have as large as possible a market for their product, an easy way to deliver their products and bill for them.

"There isn't a clear platform leader at the moment," says one such developer, Geoffrey Baird, chief executive of Commtag, a UK-based wireless application developer. "The leaders will be determined by the purchasing power of large operators - it's up to them to seed the market."

Only one thing, it seems, is widely agreed on - a single, standard platform will not emerge soon.