"Today, your Obama inauguration app isn't worth a lot of money. Yesterday, you had a good day," said Klein.

Also at the conference, Sun officials detailed several deliverables planned for 2009, including Java Specification Request 290, providing mobile browser APIs for Java ME applications and offering browser access to Web pages from mobile phones.

Java ME SDK 3.0, due in March, integrates capabilities for CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration), CDC (Connected Device Configuration), Blu-Ray disks, and Java all in a single SDK.

Milestone releases of phoneME open source projects also are planned for this year; phoneME is intended to expand usage of Java ME in the mobile handset market.

Milestone 4 of phoneMe Feature, for feature phones, is planned for March, offering virtual machine enhancements as well as improvements for the UI, multitasking, and security. Milestone 3 of PhoneMe Advanced, for more graphically rich phones, is due around September, with dual-stack CLDC/CDC support and capabilities for Java Virtual Machine Tool Interface (JVMTI) and Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation.