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Originally Posted by bwinton
I write software for mobile devices as part of my day job, and I've got to say that this is quite the ironic comment coming from the CTO of Motorola. Motorola causes us an order of magnitude more problems than any other phone manufacturer. Their MIDP implementations are both buggy and non-compliant; their networking layer is almost unusable; and useful specs on the devices are ludicrously hard to find. (As a developer, I care about the canvas size in pixels, not the screen size in inches!)
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I agree that it's ironic hearing these words from Motorola. But I'm pretty hopeful these days that the words actually signal a changing mindset on Moto's part. A lot of what they have done recently (opening the source to their Linux phone platform, opening the source to a MIDP testing harness, creating a public repository for their upcoming MIDP 3.0 implementation source code, and driving various JSRs that are designed to tighten up specs for Java-enabled devices) point to a new attitude toward openness and standardization by Motorola. This is certainly an attempt to reach out to developers where they've pushed them away in the past.
Recall that Moto attempted to acquire PalmSource in the Fall. They were clearly looking for a platform with an active developer community. When the acquisition failed I think the faction within Moto that has pushed for Java as its phone platform won out and we saw the wheels set in motion for a renewed push toward making Java ME a developer-friendly mobile computing platform. By "mobile computing" platform I mean something that exposes more of the power of the underlying system and makes Java competitive to native runtime environments like Symbian, Windows Mobile, and ALP. Take a look at the
specs for MIDP 3.0 and you'll see what I mean.