Java has made inroads both with phone manufacturers and the network operators that sell phone service to customers, but hurdles remain. Nokia, the top maker of cell phones, earlier estimated it will have shipped 50 million Java-enabled phones by the end of this year and 100 million by the end of 2003. Nokia backed away from those estimates Tuesday, however, with one source saying that as few as 10 million will ship this year. That's still a lot of phones though -- especially when measured against the still-nascent "Stinger" phones from Microsoft. And Vodafone, which sells services to one in four cell phone customers, believes Java will help boost cell phone games from Atari and others. Amit Pau, chief executive of Vodafone's global business and partner market group, demonstrated a 3D colour car racing game written in Java running on a cell phone during Sun chief executive Scott McNealy's keynote address Tuesday. Vodafone Japanese subsidiary J-Phone Communications shipped 4 million Java-enabled phones in the last 6 months, he said, with Java used for viewing pictures and playing games. Now Sun is trying to outflank Microsoft by building Web services features into Java-powered cell phones. The original goal for Monty, though, didn't include Web services capabilities, Green said. "I didn't tell them at the time that it had to do Web services because they would have flipped," Green said. The developers had enough on their plates as it was -- trying to speed up Java execution on a battery-operated machine with a hundredth the processing power and memory of a PC. News.com's Ben Charny contributed to this report.
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