Sun Definitely Developing A Phone This Year
Monday, April 21st, 2008
One thing that still springs to mind when I think of the MySQL User Conference last week is Sun's opening keynote. While talking about Sun's market penetration with open source software, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, slipped in a short mention of the mobile market saying something along the lines of "Sun is going to be entering the mobile market later on this year". He didn't spend more than 5 seconds talking about it, moving on to the acquisition of MySQL.
Last year, Sun already made an announcement of JavaFX, a Java-based mobile platform but didn't provide any concrete timelines, so I was excited to hear the more on the subject. With Apple iPhone's advent last year and Google entering the same space later on this year with Android, Sun's addition to the game definitely won't hurt consumers. After all, competition usually leads to better products.
So when is the phone coming, Jonathan? My guess is you're going to try as hard as possible to compete with Google's second half of 2008 timeline but are you going to manage to beat it? And will it blow us away? I guess time will show.

(+2 rating, 2 votes)
beer planet is Artem Russakovskii's blog. Artem is a software engineer at
April 21st, 2008 at 9:20 pm
nice openmoko pic
April 21st, 2008 at 9:38 pm
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:12 am
The acquisition of Montalvo Systems by Sun Microsystems also plays nicely into this theory
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:19 am
With their funding problems, it seems like they really needed to find a roof and Sun happened to be it for whatever reason.
I think Sun is acquiring it to compete with Intel (if that's even possible anymore) rather than build them a mobile phone chip.
Also, if they were developing a mobile phone chip for Sun, wouldn't Sun have tried to acquire them a lot earlier considering the phone release schedule?
There is still a chance you're right, of course, as Montalvo chip design may turn out to be perfect for cell phones with its small 2nd core and ultra low power usage.
I guess we shall see very soon
May 31st, 2008 at 4:20 pm
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