Magic Banana,
To clarify, the phones I purchase are NEVER connected to any service or
activated and airplane/flight mode is turned on so as to make them pocket
computers. There would be no remote updating as in an always-connected
android device and there is no wifi at all. I am thinking way older and
lower-tech than that. My target is older phones that support Java CLDC and
MIDP, so about 2002 onwards. My idea is to re-purpose them so that they are
no longer phones and put them in the hands of curious child and adult hackers
with only Free MIDlets. In my opinion, this far exceeds the interest and
goodness of any one of the current hand-held gaming units. Users can copy,
share, modify, etc. all the programs, provided they have that darned Wireless
Toolkit (which is quite old) to compile with. That right there is the
hang-up. I am not worried about remote updates because the companies no
longer care about a 3+ year old budget prepaid phone. On some of the more
expensive phones, such as Motorola ROKR, there is aftermarket firmware to
replace the factory one, but it is not for every phone and I actually think
that it is not 100% Free anyways.
I am not sure if a JavaME applet could run unmodified on a Free Desktop, but
maybe it could be tested on Replicant if that system can run JavaME programs.
Otherwise, since they have the source, the users could adapt it to run on
JavaSE with OpenJDK. Since it is a playful on-the-side thing, I am not
looking to sway people to do anything except start running Free JavaME apps
on their old outdated phones. It's not as if by making a killer-app for J2ME
I could convince users to abandon GNU/Linux and start illogically using Apple
products. Whenever possible in the "about pages" I always advocate for using
100% Free Software, so rather than hinder users switching to Freedom, I would
rather hope I might actually lure them into it by showing them how it can
breathe new life into "outdated" phones they may have otherwise thrown away.
