DeCare Systems Ireland Blog

The weather hasn’t been that great in San Francisco. The locals whom I talked to told me that it hadn’t been good recently. Unfortunately the weather forecasts don’t look promising either. Well… It’s not like we’re going to have outdoor sessions, anyway…

The second day of JavaOne 2009 started as usual. I, just like a few thousand other fellow Java developers, took my place in the General Hall for the morning key note speech. This general session was entitled “Being Unique With Sony Ericsson” and as the title suggests, it was the Sony Ericsson session.

Chris Melissinos, our host, greeted us before inviting Christopher David (Head of Developer and Partner Engagement, Sony Ericsson) on stage. After a few introductory words, David invited a senior Java developer called Erik Hellman to work on an application, on the stage, but at the background. Hellman briefly told us about what his application would do. It was going to be developed in JavaFX and work on multiple phones. It was supposed integrate Twitter data with the user’s location data so that the received messages could be displayed only if the sender is physically close-by. When David left him alone to code happily, we could see his progress in his IDE window on the corner of the main screen. He had an hour to code his application before the end of the session.

After a quick talk about Java and Sony Ericsson, Riko Sakaguchi (Corporate VP Head of Creation and Development, Sony Ericsson) joined David on the stage. During their presentation, Sony Ericsson put the emphasis on the user experience and their plans to unite various user experiences on the handset to provide a seamless service experience.

After the first demo of the morning, Patrick Olsson (VP, Head of Software Creation and Development) came on the stage. He talked about the evolution of Java on Sony Ericsson handsets, starting with the T610 in 2003. The Java support was very limited on this first Sony Ericsson-Java phone. In 2005, Java became a first class citizen and 2006 brought multitasking to Java mobile applications. Their unique API came out in 2007. In 2008, they announced the project Capuchin, which is a Java ME API that defines a bridge between the Java ME and Adobe Flash Lite programming environments. And this year, in 2009, they joined and have been working with JATAF (Java Application Terminal Alignment Framework), which is a new collaborative project that involves companies and developers who work together to make Java ME a truly ubiquitous platform for application deployment on mobile devices.

It turns out that Sony Ericsson have 200 million active devices today. I wonder how many of those are smart-phones to channel the seamless experience that they would like us, the Java developers, to provide the user with. On the other hand, they looked committed to improve their Java API by including some smarter-phone features such as their new step-counter API.

Later, two more people were invited on stage for testimonials: Jason Loia (COO, Digital Chocolate) and Martin Wipley (Director of Technology, Orange). They explained how satisfied and thrilled to have worked with Sony Ericsson. Wipley told us that Orange serves 130 million customer across 22 countries, making allusion to yesterday’s Verizon numbers. One thing that they said was too big to miss in my opinion. Not that it was exceptional, it just confirmed a trend. They said “These guys [Sony Ericsson] had accelerometers well before this feature became popular”.

I want to hit the Pause button here for a quick while. It really seems that there’s a new epidemic in town, one that I would call “iPhonitis”… or “Applitis” if you will. It’s disturbing to see all these big companies represented by well-respected people trying to convince the world that they had, designed, did or thought about things before iPhone/Apple made them popular. Obviously, during these silent-comparisons, nobody has mentioned the name of “iPhone” but the elephant is in the room where mobile Java is concerned… where mobile world is concerned, for that matter, it’s not just a Java-specific trouble. Microsoft suffers amply from the same problem when they tell us that they have more Microsoft CE running telephones on the market. It may be true but it’s irrelevant because “who cares?” If the users care about something, they care about the mobile experience. They don’t care if Sun had an app store idea last year, they don’t care if there’s more Microsoft CE device out there, they don’t care who invented the accelerometer. They care about what they get and how they get it. If you give them a “smart-phone” where they have to puncture the screen with a stylus to click on an icon, then they’re not going to like it, because iPhone and Android do it much better. If you tell the developers that they can deploy a movie app on a mobile phone and if the demo shows a video trailer at a speed of 2 frames per second, they’re not going to like it because we know what iPhone and Android offer, because we have these devices, because even as you guys speak, some of us use them to tweet or even blog. We want that type of experience. iPhone and Android make us “want to” use the mobile device, we don’t use it because we “have to”. So, I think it would benefit all of us if we took a second to admit that Apple did it right. Maybe you had the idea or the feature before but they made it popular. <humor>So, if you want to show how cool your smart-phone is, there’s an app for that!</humor>. Going back to the session, Sakaguchi told us that at Sony Ericsson, they’re aiming for having 800 million active devices in 3 years. He, then, talked about the Market Place, where they’ve had more than 200 million downloads/year and served more than 200 million users over 70 million countries. However this market place is not for applications yet. Since last week, the users have been able to download movies and the application market is coming soon. As he put it: “money is one click away”.

Even though it makes all of us smile, I love these yet-another-app-store announcements. Why? Because they are positive steps taken towards creating an ecosystem where we, developers, are given an opportunity and means to reach a significant customer base. This is a direct link to our potential users. So keep’em coming!

The good thing about the new Sony Ericsson app store is that it’s going to be free to submit an application. In my opinion, this simple and low entry barrier is a necessary step in luring the developers. The app store is going to be launched on the 1st of July on submit.sonyericsson.com. The revenue model is similar to Apple’s: 70%/30%, meaning 70% of the sales go to the developer. Sony Ericsson’s cut is 30%. Can this generate what they’re looking for? Maybe. But more importantly, this can give an opportunity to the non-iPhone/non-Android users to prove that they can create and sustain an application ecosystem. I think the concept is well-known by all mobile users by now. Depending on the quality of the apps, it may well be here to stay. I can hear you saying “Oh great! Now we’re going to have a fart app on each phone!”. Well… If that’s what the users want, at least they’re going to get it.

Finally, Erik Hellman finished coding and his brand new application was ready for the final demo. It was developed using JavaFX SDK and it worked on two different phones. As promised it filtered his Twitter messages using his GPS location. Very nice and simple! JavaFX looked powerful in this demo.

- Yagiz -

Technorati Tags: JavaOne 2009, Sony Ericsson, Java, Java ME, JATAF, iPhone, Android