It's been an interesting few months for those of us concerned with the number of handsets our Java ME applications will actually work on. The good news is that probably over 90% of the 256 million handsets sold in July, August and September now fully support Java ME MIDP 2.0. That's a formidable number of users.

Big news is that Phillips, NEC and BenQ-Siemens have all pulled out of the European market which, although sad for the employees of these companies, it is good for developers as we will have fewer ranges to support going forward.

More good news for developers is that Sony Ericsson and Nokia both had good quarters. Of all the handset manufacturers these two have the best handsets to build applications for (good conformance to the specifications) and the best developer areas so it brings a smile to our face to see them doing well.

Motorola had a relatively bad quarter now that people have got bored with the V3 and friends (PEBL, ROKR, etc) range. Although Motorola's are relatively easy to build for their operating system and GPRS settings configuration are a nightmare and drive us to distraction.



Please note that the above graph may contain inaccuracies. I got the data from a number of different sources most referencing a report from Strategy Analytics. The separation of S60 in the Nokia share is probably a simplification of their actual percentages although it is based on the Q3 sales figures retrieved from their corporate website.