Guy Kewney first reported the rumors last week, and now eWeek’s running a story saying that SavaJe, the developer of a Java mobile phone OS, is about to go under. This is hardly surprising, really — about this time last year I was surprised to find that the company was still in business, and I’ve always thought the company was little more than a ruse by operators, despite the other huge investments they’d managed to attract.





On the one hand it is really too bad, there were some good people, colleagues of mine from my WAP Toolkit days at Nokia Boston, working there. I hope they land on their feet, and they probably will considering the J2ME and mobile development happening the I-128. Maybe they’ll even go back to the Big Blue N.
OTOH, for a company that worked as long and hard as they did, I never saw the flashy press release, the video of the breakthrough phone OS, or images of the devices, even proto devices, slapped all over Engadget and Gizmodo for being so glamorous. Nothing. Just idle gossip about how the early versions of their video player app on their proto platform pulled so much juice it would physically destroy the batteries in 30 mins or less.
FJ — I have to say when I saw an early version of the SavaJe OS at 3GSM in Cannes, I wasn’t particularly impressed. That is, once I was allowed to see it. Apparently a person wearing a press badge asking for a demo of a phone running the software at their booth wasn’t a contingency for which they’d planned.
Bad for SavaJe, but not necessarily bad for the industry. We need less application platforms for after-market applications, not more, of course as long as the platforms that remain are good.
What about current platforms that remain is “good”? AFAIK they’re all expensive, underpowered and closed/proprietary. Who’s making any money with them at all?