farbot.com

This week's iPhone SDK announcement from Apple was impressive enough, showing off early games from Electronic Arts and showing a very reasonable set of fees for hosting applications -- if Apple likes them -- but today I found something downright electrifying to the mobile device space. Sun Microsystems is porting Java to the iPhone and will be distributing it for free via the upcoming App Store.

This is a major bit of news that I'm frankly pretty jealous of. The Nokia web tablets don't have Java available to them and have instead made do with Python. Python should also be ported to the iPhone in short order now that I think about it, and perhaps it's a lightweight enough language to be better for some tasks, but Java has a very long development history. Having Java on the iPhone opens up a lot of software possibilities and if it's free, it'll be something developers can sell solutions on top of.

Source: OSNews, 2008-03-08.

Update: It turns out that the fine print on the SDK is causing Sun to have second thoughts about whether Apple will legally allow it to port Java to the device. Add in restrictions against any other browser being ported to it and so on and you have yet another walled garden, this one controlled by Apple and Apple alone. No carrier required. Thanks, but I'll keep my Nokia N800 "smartphone with the phone" as I like to call it.

Source: Slashdot, 2008-03-11.