Excerpt on Resource efficiency
For Java to live up to the forecasts that by 2008 it will ship on 85 per cent of new handsets - it is currently supported on less than a quarter of phones, though on almost half of new shipments - it needs to be highly resource efficient. To date, it has only had a place on high end smart phones and media phones, which command sufficiently large price tags that manufacturers can be generous with processor speed and memory and so counter the effects of battery drain. This has created a particularly attractive market in Japan and Korea, where consumers will bear far higher phone prices than elsewhere.Read Java to dominate consumer electronics?
But in the European and US mass markets, price and battery life remain the top two factors in consumer choice, which means making Java efficient on small devices - while still being able to deliver the kind of services that are currently the preserve of the premium phones, but will increasingly become expected on all models.
"The demand on memory, battery and clock speed is growing more quickly than the efficiency of the hardware, so the efficiency of software becomes critical," commented Christophe Francois, head of strategic marketing at Esmertec. Yet it is vital, particularly for the success of 3G, that complex handsets that are easily customisable and offer multimedia services can be delivered at low cost, to encourage users in mature markets like Europe to upgrade their handsets and move to 3G services.