Further to my recent post on the future of Java, I had an email from someone I worked with at Symbian when I worked on the Symbian Java VM implementation. He had attended a session at SEE2009 on the Future of Managed Runtime.

All Nokia S60 phones  S60 3rd fp 2 and later include the IBM J9 VM. Nokia have done lots of extra work on this to make Java apps behave (from a user viewpoint) like Symbian native apps, improve performance and improve existing APIs. IBM J9 VM is now ‘the’ Symbian Java runtime.

The challenge for Symbian Foundation (and Nokia) is to open source the OS without infringing intellectual property rights or licences. Apparently, as expected, IBM won’t EPL their J9 virtual machine but they will allow third party developers who build their own Symbian ROM for the new TI reference platform to include a JVM for R&D purposes. Once they finalise their licensing talks with the foundation, phone manufacturers will still need to pay for the VM.

Hence, if phone OEMs want to include Java in the Symbian OS then the OS won’t be entirely free. From my experience on the the Symbian Java VM, I suspect plugging in a different 3rd party JVM to bring it up to the current Nokia implementation, would be a costly exercise.

As an aside, apparently Motorola gave away MIDP3 to Applix so maybe their one-year-old announcement that the reference implementation would be open sourced has become irrelevant.

If the Java on Symbian interests you then there are more thoughts and comments here and here.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Symbian, Mobile, J2ME. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.