Continuing on its campaign for world domination, Sun Microsystems Inc’s Javasoft Inc division has revealed plans to build Java into mobile phones. The company claims to be talking to all major players in the European mobile phone market, and will announce one name in December, followed by others in the new year. Javasoft’s European marketing manager for Europe, Amy Porter, based out of Paris, explained that using Java would free phone makers from dependence on one processor type, and also let manufacturers download new features to phones over the network. Microsoft’s ActiveX components are too big and fat, and also too susceptible to viruses to do this, sniped Porter. Javasoft plans to ramp up staff numbers from the current 350 to around 700 by the end of June. Not bad going when you consider the Sun division only had 90 staff back in July. The bulk of employees are engineers, with just a handful in marketing and sales. There are no current plans to hand over Java for safekeeping to an independent standards body such as the Open Group, as Javasoft says it is still only halfway through building Java libraries and Application Programming Interfaces. But it is not completely out of the realms of possibility, said Porter.
