Skype Offers Half Pregnant Java Mobile Phone Client

Skype on many leading mobile phones, although depending on where you live you can’t use it to call people.
The java based mobile thin Skype client works on around 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The standard feature set includes chat, group chat, presence, receiving calls from Skype users, and through SkypeIn. The half pregnant part: Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls are initially only supported in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
It’s a big step forward for Skype; the company has a partnership with the 3 network and offers Skype enabled phones (and even a Skype phone) in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau, Sweden and the United Kingdom, but Skype on handsets outside of these markets has been the domain of third party go-between services until now. For eBay, getting Skype on more phones means increased use of the service, and hopefully enough profit to keep it from selling Skype at the end of the year.
Skype notes that this release is “expected to last several months, after which a public version of the application will be made available to millions of mobile phone owners around the world,” by which we’d hope is a fully fledged Skype client for everyone.

Defending Java against Paul Murphy

Paul Murphy recently wrote a piece where he made the worst insult a Unix person can make about any technology used in Unix environments. He called Java “Windows on Unix.” Next up, Paul Murphy will call Dallas residents New Yorkers in cowboy hats, and accuse Hillary Clinton of being a fan of William F. Buckley.
But hey, every interest group has an enemy, and for old-school Unix types, hatred of Microsoft is knitted into the fabric of their cardigan sweaters. What moved me to respond, however, was what I consider to be an inaccurate portrayal of the Java environment. Granted, I’m a Microsoft employee and think .NET is the best thing since sliced bread. I am also, however, a programmer who spent seven years on and off doing various kinds of Java work.
The core problem in Murphy’s piece is that he seems to have bought into Sun’s former marketing, believing that Java is merely a means by which to ensure a program can be “written once and run anywhere.” Yes, James Gosling and his team of developers at Sun originally designed Java (then named “Oak”) as a platform to run within Set-Top Boxes with an eye towards making it easy to write one program that executes on multiple types of hardware. And yes, Java has found itself into other devices where cross-platform support is important, such as cell phones, and even Blu-ray players.
Sun did make a pitch to turn the Java runtime into a common layer targeted at desktop computers that would make it easy to run an application on any Java-supporting platform using one common set of “bytecodes” (the object oriented assembly language, of sorts, that defines the instructions in a Java application…not that most people would have to generate that code themselves, as that is what a Java compiler is for). That effort, however, never really went very far.