Sony Ericsson’s recent investment in Symbian, which contributed the largest single additional investment (beyond simply purchasing Psion’s shares) Mimmis describes as a “confirmation of Sony Ericsson’s commitment to Symbian OS as the platform for advanced smartphones.” Why then were applications for the Sony Ericsson’s UIQ smartphones excluded from the recent Game Developers Challenge 2004?

Well it turns out that developing applications for the P series is just too attractive to developers. “The P800 and P900 have been a huge success for third party developers,” says Mimmis. “Applications for these phones have generated the most downloadable software for the entire Handango network, more than any other phone on the market in the past year, and has helped make the Sony Ericsson Application Shop very popular. For game developers, the big screen, powerful processor and memory means that they are less constrained when it comes to creating a great consumer experience in for example a Java game.”

However mass market Java phones are an important part of Sony Ericsson product portfolio and the success of these devices is in part based on creating a market for third party Java applications. “Developers already know they can achieve a great game-playing experience with a Java game on the P800 or P900 devices. So we were concerned that if we included applications for these phones in the competition we would not see many new applications being developed for the mass market Java phones. We also want to increase awareness of our latest J2ME MIDP 2.0 phones, such as the K700 which has received excellent feedback on its Java performance and we hope will be of great interest to Java developers. The competition will also help us identify a broad range of attractive new games that will be ready in time for market launch of our latest Java phones,” says Mimmis.

To help differentiate its mass market Java devices Sony Ericsson has also incorporated into its latest range of phones the Mascot Capsule Engine Micro3D graphic engine from Hi Corp, which in Version 4 provides full JSR 184 compliance. “Adding two 3D graphics tools in our latest range of Java phones, provides developers with new options for delivering attractive applications, particularly games, to the mass market,” says Mimmis.

The move to MIDP 2.0 across the range of Sony Ericsson phone will also see an increased emphasis on enterprise applications. “The addition of features for packet communications, improved security and the ability to look up data across the network will offer a greater opportunity for enterprise applications on our range of Java enabled phones” says Mimmis.

Creating promotional activities for developers which encourage the delivery of applications to the broad portfolio of devices in Sony Ericsson’s range is clearly a challenge when the P series offers developers a platform on which they can really show off their skills. “The Game Developers Challenge is designed to show developers that they have a viable market for Java applications on all Sony Ericsson handsets, not just the P series. We are currently running consumer promotions in many countries to encourage consumers to visit a special campaign site and play the games from the competition through a web emulator, vote on the game features and help single out 20 finalists that will be evaluated by a jury. After the competition, all the games will be made available for purchase through Sony Ericsson consumer channels such as the Sony Ericsson Application Shop, which has already proved a valuable channel to market for P series applications, and is also capable of delivering the same benefits to mass market Java applications.”

Sony Ericsson Developer World has as number of resources which Java developers will find useful the highlights include the Developers' Guidelines J2ME Java 3D (URL) and a companion document Developers' Guidelines J2ME - P900 (URL). There are also two Java SDKs available, the Sony Ericsson J2ME SDK 2.1.3 (beta) for its range of Java phones and the Sony Ericsson P900 J2ME SDK for Java development on the P series.

All these documents and tools can be found on the Java Docs and Tools page (http://developer.sonyericsson.com/site/global/docstools/java/p_java.jsp) at Sony Ericsson Developer World. To be able to download, a free registration is required.