Ovum forecast that 8 out of 10 new phones shipping ‘today’ are Java-enabled - this estimate has been around since 2005 and may apply today according to Sun’s website. Informa’s 50% forecast comes from their MAPOS report I believe. The ratio of CE device to mobile device models comes from discussions with Adobe - but I recall seeing this echoed somewhere publically too (probably in terms of Flash-certified device models). But the extrapolation of device models ratio to a device volumes ratio is a *very* crude one.

BTW, read your post and enjoyed it - good work pulling together the stats.

Andress

Do you have links for some of the stats you give in the penetration section? In particular the Ovum / Informa %ages of devices with Java (I’m inclined to think its much nearer 80% than 50%, given that we’ve had over 2bn Java devices shipped already - double Adobe’s target for 2010) and the ratio of Flash handsets to consumer electronics? I was struggling to track some of these figures down for a post I did a while back, http://blog.masabi.com/2007/07/mobile-software-primer.html

It’s a nightmare to get any kind of comparable penetration stats for platforms, it looks like I actually overestimated the Flash numbers if that 2:1 ratio is correct (they only list one consumer electronics device on the Adobe site using Flash Lite so I assumed all devices were handsets).

Interesting post though!
Tom

>1. Lack of MVC model in Flash: very good point. I would
> say that I would also expect Flash 3.x to include screen-
>based primitives (as opposed to vector-based primitives)
> for more easily creating applications in the view of the
> MVC.
In fact it is more than adding screen based primitives : it is really pushing a state controller, a notion of clear data binding to uncorrelate what is displayed from its storage/representation. And yes it is something where Flex is good at, flash alone with its frame based structure won’t be able to scale up: doing many screens in flash to do a whole UI will always be long and difficult (as opposed to Flex/TAT/DigitalAirways/OpenLazslo/Silverlight/JavaFX/…and DHTML :-))

>2. Interesting note about middleware services. Anything
> specific you have in mind ?
In fact the achille heel of those “interpreted solutions” (flash+actionscript/svg+Javascript/java) is in their access to native capabilities of the platform: how to map the C/C++ or even Java world in th eaction script world (or javascript) to expose relevant middleware to the applications: typically an application shouldn’t be coded only in flash but some part may have to be C/C++ to do the tricky stuffs 99% of the usefull apps or services are in fact requiring. The achille heel of java are JSRs, for flash it is their standard APIs that will always restrict you too much (not sure about flash lite 2, but addressbook with specificities, sim application toolkits, middle telephony and many others may miss).

>3. System wide view. Couldn’t Adobe/OEMs sandbox the
> system-wide view, i.e. restrict the access to environment
> variables ?
Env variable? really not enough what do you do if you want to change th ecall state machine or how the sound is shared between two sound clients (ex: call is in the native world, mp3 player in the OEM sandbox: how to resolve the conflicts?…and more than that comply with the conflict handling specification, different for each phones?)

>4. Bluestreak et al: I would say these companies are doing
>business on the back of strong applications (e.g. ESG),
>but not on the strength of their platform..

Hum, Bluestreak is for example strongly pushing its mobile APIs, but I agree for now they focus highly on very vertical services…

good discussion

I have to find the time to make a recap of the UI technologies and companies around there.

Thomas