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It's already on over a billion phones, apparently.

Sun Microsystem's J2ME (the mobile strain of Java) is believed to have been equipped on more than 2.5 billion mobile handsets. Mighty impressive stuff, and the corner stone for the mobile games industry. But as much as we love J2ME here at Pocket Gamer, the advent of the iPhone seems to have heralded the end of the Java Age.

The system struggles to provide the next generation of mobile games people now expect, though an alternative might be around the corner. Adobe's Flash Lite has been circling for a while now, with over a billion mobile downloads of the framework to date.

Many of these downloads will be net browser related and haven't offered much other than the ability to view websites properly. But the latest version of Flash Lite, 3.1, offers a unique new feature. Just as it does in our PC internet browsers, a new form of distributable player will allow handsets to download Flash Lite on the fly.

This means that, for example, a Flash-based mobile game could be sold even though the framework isn't currently installed on the handset. Previously the user would have had to manually fetch and install the system for the game to work – a prohibitive chore that's held back the concept of Flash-based mobile gaming.
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