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Java to percolate
in 100 million Nokia phones SAN FRANCISCO--In what
some believe is the most ambitious effort yet to use Java in cell phones,
handset maker Nokia on Tuesday announced plans to sell 100 million phones
using the software language by the end of 2003. Nokia also will sell
its Communicator 9290, a personal digital assistant and cell phone wrapped
in one, in North America, said Nokia President Pekka Ala-Pietila during a
Tuesday address to the JavaOne Developers Conference in San Francisco. "So far, you had
to be a 'Charlie's Angels' to have this kind of phone," Ala-Pietila
said. A phone with Java lets
someone download software that turns the phone into an MP3 player,
minitelevision for watching films, or a portable device capable of
accessing e-mails. If Nokia goes through
with its plans, the company may single-handedly increase the number of
existing Java phones by a factor of more than 30. By most estimates, there
are now just 3 million mobile phones enabled with a form of Java called
J2ME, or Java2 MicroEdition. Ala-Pietila said Nokia
expects 50 million Java-enabled phones to ship by the end of 2002. The 100
million mark should be reached by the end of 2003. Ala-Pietila's
projections, which Sun Microsystems Executive Vice President Patricia C.
Sueltz called "an extraordinary pronouncement," is the biggest
statement yet of the cellular phone industry's push to put Java on cell
phones and, in theory, more cash in their pockets. Starting in June 2000,
Sun, which created the Java language, began a concerted effort to convince
the cell phone industry that it should
begin installing Java on phones. So far, the industry has listened. Within
the past two years, carriers from NTT DoCoMo in Japan to Nextel
Communications in the United States have begun offering Java phones to
customers. What about the
programs? Analysts think that
with Nokia onboard, the development community may wake up and start
programming. A recent survey, taken
by Evans Data, found that a third of all wireless developers intend to
write applications that run on the form of Java being poured in cell
phones. In remarks made after
his 45-minute address, Ala-Pietila tried to woo the 17,000 developers
attending the show with a story about ring tones. In Finland, the revenue
from downloading ring tones was greater than "all of the revenue of
the two Finnish television stations combined," he said. Carriers won't need
such a hard sell. Some, like Nextel Communications, are already offering
Java phones and services in North America. NTT DoCoMo in Japan has been
offering a Java phone service for nearly a year. By the end of next year,
there may be more carriers either testing or actually offering a Java
service than those that don't, analysts believe. |