Sun calls up some old chums

Sun Microsystems is set to announce some new deals with old partners that are also major mobile phone industry players.

To a large degree, the moves shore up Sun's dominance of the market supplying handset makers and mobile phone operators with download software for selling ringtones, games, screen wallpapers, and other downloads.

Ericsson and Sun, longtime partners, plan to announce today at the 2005 JavaOne Conference in San Francisco that they are working together to create mobile phones that can do more than one thing at a time. The multitasking features will be made available by the end of the year, the two companies said. The multi-taking technology is based on Sun's Connected Limited Device Configuration HotSpot Implementation.

Ericsson vice president Jörgen Lantto said in a statement: "The results [are] an important step in the evolution of Java."

Most of today's handhelds perform one task at a time, like looking up a calendar item, finding the contact's information in another listing, then dialling out. But a growing number now have the processing prowess and memory capabilities to compress the three steps into something like one-tap dialling from a contact list.

Sun also plans to announce that electronics makers Toshiba will use the same implementation for mobile phones in handsets that it's building for Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator.

Sun has also extended its relationship with Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo, which has 50 million-plus data-loving mobile phone subscribers. Together the two companies are working on what's code named "Star Project", a networking platform that NTT DoCoMo plans on using to administer its next generations of mobile phones services.

Elsewhere at the conference, England's ARM Holdings is expected to unveil new chip technology to accelerate Java in mobile devices: the Jazelle RCT (run-time compiler technology). Jazelle RCT will aim improve how Java runs on mobile phones, set-top boxes or other devices with a Jazelle-enhanced ARM chip. Video applications will be able to churn out more frames per second, for instance, and power and memory consumption will be reduced.

The first chips to contain Jazelle RCT will be the ARM Cortex-A processors.

Unlike the PC industry, mobile phone manufacturers take a somewhat gradual approach to processor changes. A substantial number of phones still use chips based on the ARM 7 core, which predates Jazelle. The first Jazelle mobile phones came out in 2003, two years after the chip was introduced. However, 50 chipmakers have licensed Jazelle and it is shipping in mobile phones in Europe and Japan, said Chris Porthouse, execution environments program manager for ARM.

"You are going to see Java used for a lot more than for gaming," Porthouse said.

Ben Charny writes for CNET News.com