JavaOne 2009 - Day 2 - Part 1

Chris Melissinos was back as the host and greeted us with an interesting announcement. From this point forward people attending the General Sessions have the opportunity to win prizes. I know that in past JavaOne's there was a tendency for attendees to skip the talks given by the conferences' partners, so this may be a way to encourage a higher turnout. We'll see how well it works...

Chrisopher David, Head of Devlopment and Partner Engagement at Sony Ericsson, was the main speaker for the talk; and while there was a decent turnout, I'm sure it would have been higher if people had known ahead of time what to expect. Instead of a typical infomercial, the main focus was on information and the commercial bits, at least to me, seemed more like a gentle reminder than the a jab n the ribs.

Christopher stater by bringing introducing Erik Hullman, a Senior Java Developer with Sony Ericsson, who was tasked with writing an application using JavaFX that would run on three different phones. The catch is that he had to do it all while the main presentation was going on and be done by the end of the talk. Erik decided to create a Twitter client that only accepted tweets from the area around JavaOne and began typing.

While Erik was busy, Christopher gave us a quick look at Sony Ericcson's history with Java and introduced several guests to talk about what they're doing now and are planning to do in the near future.

First up was Rikko Sakaguchi, Corporate VP of Creation and Development, who's primary focus is on the user experience. Rikko is focused the improvement of user experiences available from Sony Ericcson products. Rikko spoke about the opportunity for taking two of the most popular things people use mobile devices for, communication and entertainment, and finding ways to create applications that blend them and create compelling user experiences. The goal seems to be moving the mobile experience from being about what I do and what I experience, to what we do and what we experience.

The idea is to take cool devices, broaden the horizon of what you can experience and do with them, and create a fusion using their combined capabilities. As an example of this, a demonstration was attempted, that showed a cell phone displaying the output from a PlayStation-3 and controlling it. The demo wasn't completely successful, but it worked well enough that we could see enough to believe that it could work.

Patrik Olssen, VP Head of Software Creation and Development, was next and he spoke about their serious commitment to User Experience for end users, developers and network operators. One interesting note is that in 2005, Sony Ericcson decided that instead of using C/C++ to create mobile devices that run Java that they would us Java for all their internal development.Part of what helps in creating a great user experience for the traditional end user is that more contextual information is being made available to software developers. Another thing that helps is that Sony Ericcson is working with several other businesses on the JATAF initiative - which it intended to minimize the fragmentation cause by different Java implementations.

Christopher wrapped things up with a call to action encouraging us to create applications for Sony Ericcson products and making them available to the over 200 million customers through Sony Ericsson's own application store known as Play Now which has been around for several years but until recently was a closed system It is now open to anyone who wants to submit an application and the promise made was that your application, if accepted, could be in the Play Now store thirty days after you submit it.

The session closed with a short video that contained a great suggestion. "Think BIG! Create small."

Burk Hufnagel reporting for DZone