Differences between players for different phones
Java on mobile phones
Java on mobile phones comes in two flavours
- A modified MIDP implementation such as the DoCoMo i-mode phone
- A standard MIDP implementation plus extensions such as those for Vodafone, H3G, J-Phone, KDDI, Nokia and XCE
In the first case a standard Midlet will not run on the phone.
In the second case a standard Midlet created by the product will run perfectly well. In some cases
the product provides a player which will provide access to extension features such as sound, vibration and number dialing.
Where possible the generated midlet (or midlet with extensions) and i-appli will behave the same
but there are some basic differences which should be understood.
Graphic drawing differences
There are some differences in the graphics capabilites of target phones which should be noted. Filled polygons are supported
by imode iappli's however midlets only support filled rectangles and not polygons. Because
of this a polygon in the product's midlets is never filled unless it is a rectangle.
The product fully supports circle drawing but because this is not supported in
i-appli's approximating octogons will appear on 503i and 504i series i-mode phones.
Soft buttons
In the applet softbuttons are shown as standard java buttons underneath the
movie. They only appear if a movie uses (or might use) buttons.
The editor allows right/left positioning of buttons which will work perfectly
i-mode phones. For midlets the psotioning will be detrmined by the order of adding the
buttons. Also midlets will allow more than two soft button actions to be enabled in which
case a submenu of options will appear when the softbutton is pushed.
The codebase
Midlets don't have the ability to know where they have been downloaded from
so when resources have to be retrieved from the server by a midlet it is important that the
movie has the codebase correctly set.
Including the JAR manifest for midlets
In some cases the JAR manifest may not be required for running on a phone since
much of the information can be fond in the JAD file. Consult the target phone's
technical requirements before turning off this option. Removing the manifest can
save around 400 bytes.
Creating the JAD file for midlets
Some phones such as Nokia phones will not require the JAD file as all runtime
information is included in the JAR manifest file. This option does not apply to KDDI
J-Phone midlets.
Specifying the vendor
The vendor name is an option that can be specified for all midlet based devices (ie. standard midlet,
J-Phone and KDDI).