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I am leery about reviews. The app I mentioned had five stars, and a ton of positive reviews. However, if you looked at the reviews, they were stuff like "Game play great!" [sic], or other pithy, fake reviews. One had to dig through a ton of the fake positives in order to find the one star "SMS spammer" items.

It sounds like you were on a site like GetJar. If you notice, GetJar has iPhone applications as well. And if you're willing to take the extra steps required to leave the walled garden of your OS, whether it's Android or iOS, it's ultimately your responsibility if you decide to use a badly run online App Store after that.

OK, and who says S40 Java-based phones cannot install apps?

http://www.getjar.com/

Install all the J2ME apps you want.

If you want to install the apps from your phone, just go to m.getjar.com.

Or any one of a number of other places. Or Nokia's own appstore.

Any other so-called differences between "smart" phones and "feature" phones?

Agreed. Isn't this the whole "Apple Store" argument: "It's their store and they can do what they want?"

The difference between the two, of course, is that Apple owns the store and is also the mayor of the town and makes sure that nobody else opens a store in their town. Don't like it? Move to a different town.

Google is welcome to make these changes. If developers don't like it, they can still sell their applications. They can go through Amazon's Appstore, Opera Mobile App Store, GetJar, AndAppStore, Handango, onlyAndroid Superstore, Insyde Market, Appoke, and various others. They can also sell them via their own website or they could even put it on a CD and sell it through a real-world store in a box or something. I know--how quaint.

Most so-called dumb or feature phones allow you to install Java programs.

There's plenty of stuff you can do with the MIDP API:
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Develop/Series_40/

>Smart phones are more like computers that way; they're meant to have programs installed after you get it.
http://www.getjar.com/

People were installing Java apps before Apple even awoke to the concept.

So the question remains, what's a smartphone (other than the acid-wash jeans/Swatch of the 2000s)?

Gotta love Android

http://www.getjar.com/mobile/150397/tricorder-by-moonblink-for-google-nexus-s

Undoing my moderation to respond to this, as nobody's called BS.

"Well established"? Smartphones were a niche market before the iPhone, and only exploded in popularity (and continue to grow dramatically) after the iPhone was introduced in 2007.

Really? Let's try some actual data. See the chart following the 2nd paragraph. Compare the figures for each successive year:

04-05: 214% growth.
05-06: 95% growth.
06-07: 139% growth.
07-08: 61% growth.

Yeah, really looks like the launch of the iPhone had a serious impact on the sector's growth. A slight blip in the first year of availability, followed by a substantial drop in the second.

"Who's going to care?"

Just about everyone that isn't besotted with the likes of Apple and Android handsets:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/mobile-phones/news/2010/01/29/Nokia-Regains-40--Mobile-Phone-Market-Share/p1

See this graph here? -

http://stats.getjar.com/statistics/

Apple, HTC et. al. are the little black line at the bottom, otherwise known as the x-axis.

When you step outside the world of Slashdot and other IT sites that focus purely on smartphones a term which gets redefined depending on the bias of the site you visit anyway, you'll begin to realise that Nokia's ~45% - 50% of the world cell phone market does actually kinda matter, and Apple and HTC's ~0.2% share just doesn't.

So say what you want, but Nokia is far and away the big fish in the ocean, the likes of the iPhone is like a microbe still waiting to evolve in comparison.

Nokia still wins the hearts and minds of far more people than any other phone manufacturer can come even close to.

Why not Symbian? It's the most widely used mobile platform in the world, which is considerably bigger than the US.
And there's no lame restrictions on what can or cannot be done, there's a full Carbide C++ SDK for native apps (for S60) and there's been heaps of apps since 2002 that nobody in the USA has ever heard of.

No. The statistics on that page are not actual market share statistics, but are collected by counting web traffic from certain mobile websites. These kinds of statistics probably underestimate the usage of iPhone, Android, WebOS, and other phones that come with full web browsers, since these devices need not use specially designed mobile websites.

I hate to break it to you, but Nokia's global market share is several times greater than that of their nearest competitor, it is up about 25% (39% share vs 52% this year) from last year, and it's about 477 times greater than Apple's share (0.11%) of the cell phone market.

Even RIM has about 25 times greater market share than Apple. Frankly, as popular as the iPhone is (4% of the smartphone market), it is peanuts when put in perspective.

http://stats.getjar.com/statistics/

Dear iPhone users and Developers: You have been ignored. Don't blog about it, don't whine. If you are an iPhone only developer and your app was rejected without any meaningful reason, bad for you...

Next time, have decency to ship same application for Symbian userbase, Windows Mobile and even J2ME. Yes, the "cool platform" choice of you have tendency to reject applications and even have capability to kill them remotely. Now, it is not that cool or trendy, head to http://www.forum.nokia.com/ . There you have access to 100M potential users. Or head to http://www.getjar.com/ and see what are you missing.

Right now, writing this message, I see this Google Ad at top
  "Unlock i`Phone -
Millions of Satisfied Customers Unlock Your i`Phone Now!
www.Unlock-the-iPhone.com"

Expect something good from that platform especially for development?

The iPhone is .05% of world cellphone market, Blackberry is .72% (peaked at ~2.1%). MIDP 2.0 is a whopping 69.46%! All numbers taken from here. I would say developing for MIDP 2.0 and tweaking where devices significantly vary from the standard is probably the way to go.

You sir, need to head over to http://wap.getjar.com/ with your mobile phone and see all the quality apps developed and uploaded for testing and evaluation With your desktop browser just go to www.getjar.com and see what's available there

and the best part of all these things are: they run in a java sandbox on your phone and uses gprs so you end up doing most everything you can do with a desktop browser, but on your phone and for the equivalent of a couple of cents

I have heard some complain about it running in a java sandbox and having to go through a couple of extra clicks of the joystick on the phone to get to them, but that is just silly considering the benefits you get

Using your mobile to help stay in shape is a good idea, but there's really no need to buy a separate phone to do so (unless you want additional hardware functionality, like being able to hook it up to your running shoes).

There are quite a few Java applications out there to do so that work on most new mobile phones, like GymTracker to track workouts and KCal to monitor calorie consumption.

Using your mobile to help stay in shape is a good idea, but there's really no need to buy a separate phone to do so (unless you want additional hardware functionality, like being able to hook it up to your running shoes).

There are quite a few Java applications out there to do so that work on most new mobile phones, like GymTracker to track workouts and KCal to monitor calorie consumption.

If you have to travel to Germany you may consider having a english-german dictionary on your mobile phone. You may try http://www.sf.net/projects/mobidict (disclaimer: I am the author of the software)

If you want some more ideas: http://www.getjar.com/

Yes, it would be just terrible if something like that were to happen...

I cannot get very far in the download with my WAP browser on my blackberry 7510 before it says download failed. On a side note, I have been trying to download and install 1.2 for a few days now, but I keep getting a java out of memory error on installation. I guess they did not QA for all platforms.

Mirror:
http://www.getjar.com/products/3334/OperaMini
or from your phone:
wap.getjar.com

One 4K version of tetris on that page uses almost 40 MB of RAM after a few minutes

Did you consider that the memory you're seeing may be JVM overhead combined with pre-allocation? In smaller devices (like Cell Phones), the JVM is built into the device. So there's no real overhead for Java. The pre-allocation is also smaller to compensate for the smaller device. Considering that many of these devices have barely 64K available (never mind 120K), I'd say that Java fits just fine.

and after playing for a while there's occasional, noticeable pauses for garbage collection (yes, I verified it was from garbage collection)

I find it interesting that you singled out such an example without looking at many of the more interesting examples like T4XI, Robotron 4096, and Hunters 4K. Also, you may find Tetris 4K to be a much better version than the first item on the list.

Java's great for some tasks, it's almost like a cross-platform VB. But the language, or more likely the way the language is most commonly used, isn't optimal for some things. Games happen to be one of those things.

You don't know what you're talking about.

At one point I could have pointed to the poor performance and massive memory usage of VegaStrike. Does that mean that C/C++ is a "bad" langauge? NO! It means that it was poorly coded and still needed lots of work done. The developers worked on improving their codebase, and low-and-behold, the game got better. Perhaps it wasn't the language after all?

here's few links:
for MSN Messenger
for ICQ
for IRC

using GPRS isn't free either, but it's still cheaper compared to sending same amount of text over SMS