"If you wanted to support every phone in the market, you might have to do several hundred different builds of your software," Devitt said. Developers now are most excited about writing mostly Web-based applications using HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as well as Javascript, which despite its name is not closely related to Java, he said. RIM has added support for Google's Gears development plug-in for writing Web-based BlackBerry applications.

Because Sun has largely handed the reins of mobile Java to the developer community, Oracle couldn't change the mobile Java world much even if it wanted.

"At this point, you can't put the genie back in the bottle," said analyst Avi Greengart of Current Analysis.