As competition intensifies in the mobile space, greater focus is being placed on the user experience. The user experience is enabled by applications and content on the mobile device. The cool applications that developers create greatly increase device usability and enable operators to differentiate their services and charge accordingly.
To facilitate the developer’s job, Motorola’s mobile platforms are designed to offer a choice of application environments that leverage different technologies and areas of expertise. Not only must developers consider the ease of development, but they must also consider the power and performance requirements of their application.
| Mobile Platforms | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Application Environments | Motorola OS | UIQ/Symbian | Windows Mobile | MOTOMAGX |
| Java™ ME | ||||
| WebUI | ||||
| Native UIQ/Symbian | ||||
| Native Linux® | ||||
| Native Windows Mobile | ||||
Offering a common application environment across mobile devices with different operating systems, along with the philosophy of “write once, run everywhere,” has contributed to the phenomenal growth of the Java ME community. Java ME is deployed on more than 2.1 billion phones worldwide (Sun Microsystems, 02/08); 8 out of 10 new mobile devices sold in the marketplace today are Java-enabled; and most carriers support the Java technology.
Java ME is a secure, mature, and widely supported technology that can provide a rich user experience. Java ME has enabled the success of mobile gaming and is also widely used for entertainment applications.
Currently, most Motorola handsets provide a MIDP 2.0 (Mobile Information Device Profile) implementation, which offers a set of Java APIs that are specialized for use in mobile phones – for such things as security, user interfaces, persistent storage, networking, and applications.
Motorola is one of the largest licensees of Java ME and has played an active role in the development of the Java ME (formerly known as J2ME™) technology, collaborating with Sun Microsystems to develop an edition of the Java 2 platform for small devices such as cell phones and pagers. Motorola launched the first Java-enabled handset in North America in 2001, and continues to drive the creation of Java ME standards, leading the JSR (Java Specification Request) for Bluetooth (JSR 82) and the upcoming Mobile Information Device Profile 3.0 (JSR 271, MIDP 3.0), among others.
A billion people tap into the Internet, typically from a PC, and three billion are mobile phone users, making the market for mobile web applications potentially vast. WebUI taps into this market by combining the web with mobile device services. With WebUI, developers can create mobile widgets and Web 2.0 applications using familiar web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and AJAX. These applications can use the rich set of WebUI APIs to access device resources and services such as multimedia, location, browser, phonebook, and more.
WebUI is based on WebKit, the popular open source engine for Internet services that powers the MOTOMAGX browser. Mobile widgets from Apple, Nokia, and Google also use the WebKit engine, opening up opportunities for developers to port their applications between platforms.
WebUI allows developers to create innovative applications ranging from narrowly scoped widgets to truly personal mobile web applications that are fully secure. By offering real-time access to vital information such as stock quotes, sports scores, and social networks, WebUI will drive increased usage of data services, and result in greater revenues for carriers.
The first mobile platform to support WebUI is MOTOMAGX, with other mobile platforms planning support in the future.
Native application environments are designed to enhance the user experience on the mobile phone by providing richer functionality as well as richer graphical effects. By creating applications and services in C or C++, developers have greater access to the services of the OS, and better performance in memory use, start-up times, and execution speed.
Native code is particularly suited for processor-intensive applications such as gaming and complex business applications. It is also preferred for advanced graphics, such as those used in high-end 3D games, and for long-running applications such as email or SMS clients where memory is an issue.
Motorola’s application environments, combined with the relevant tools available through Motorola’s MOTODEV Studio and the developer resources of the MOTODEV developer network, will help to foster developer innovation and accelerate time to market for developers’ applications.

