I know that writing these piecemeal information droplets about operators' differing Java security domain policies is not optimal way of giving a good overview of the situation (Sebastian has already noted this in his comment to my previous post...,), however I am writing these things as I am learning myself, and I think it is more valuable to get something out than wait forever in preparation for the ultimate security domain info package (which I hope to still compile some day, if all my other duties give me enough time to achieve that...)

While looking for other Sprint (big CDMA operatore in U.S.) related information I found quite a nice information package about Java API security on Sprint devices on their developer web site.

The short summary is that audio/video recording, reading/writing personal data (files & PIM), sending a message, and getting a location from the network all require signing. Otherwise, no access.

The good news is that all Sprint devices have a dormant developer root certificate, which the developer can activate. Then he or she can sign the MIDlets with a Verisign certificate and test the application on a real device (on the activated device only).

For more information, go to this page.

Scott Jenson (lead UI designer at Google) spoke recently at Stanford's Human Computer Interaction group's seminar series about browsing on mobile phones. The archived talk (duration: 1h) is freely available at Stanford Online.

As I have been working in the mobile phone industry for years, there were no huge surprises in his talk. Yes, on many past and current phones the web browsing sucks. Transcoders cripple the content, layout, and UI elements. There are always too many clicks and round-trips to the server to read just one story. And the user is always scrolling. In many cases with mobile browsing it is not clear if the value of the information is greater than the pain felt by the user navigating with small screen, slow bandwidth and crippled content.

Let's face it. UI and controls on mobile devices are different. Lack of mouse means different control mechanisms, and new, improved zooming of Google (mobile) Maps was used as an example (there are other good examples among mobile games for mobile UI/control adaptation). And the small screens continue creating problems (even though the amount of pixels increases, the physical screen sizes are staying about the same or increasing only slightly).

I liked Jenson's idea of using small phone screens as his presentation slides, as it really made the small screen estate problem on mobile devices obvious. Unfortunately this rendered his slides quite unreadable in the archived presentation. 

The talk was part of a weekly seminar series at Stanford's Human Computer Interaction lab, and I have enjoyed quite a few talks in person or though the free online archive. The good part in listening these archived talks is that you can speed-listen them (all the way up to 1.7 times the normal speed, which makes the presenters look and sound like hyperactive coffee junkies) - the bad part is that the audience might not ask the question you would like to ask.

I attended a nice Flash Lite eSeminar organized Adobe, in which Scott Janousek and Richard Leggett demonstrated Flash Lite application development. The online seminar is part of a Flash Lite eSeminar series. Adobe developer services apparently organizes these seminars once a month, towards to the end of the month, so it is worth checking the Adobe's developer website at least in the middle of every month to find out whats coming in the pipeline.

During the webcast Scott described how to develop an interactive screen saver to display the the battery levels, signal strength, charging, (and other system properties) with nice animations. Richard had another walk-through on how to develop a multi-player game based on Sushi server (and utilizing XML sockets). On the live webcast there were major connection problems to the presenter's computer, but these should be corrected for the archived/recorded version.

I also enjoyed very much the Q&A session, there were some excellent questions asked. All in all, a content-rich presentation by two very knowledgeable people (these guys have written a very good Flash Lite book together with Weyert de Boer). The recorded version is worth checking out (I do not know when it is available).