I am currently working on a university course project on Java 2 Micro Edition, which requires me to make an application that should work in a real phone. I chose to create a PIM (Contacts) backup tool, which I would run on my HTC Touch Cruise, a PDA Phone based on Windows Mobile 6 (or 6.1, but I haven’t upgraded my firmware). The tool would read all of the contacts data from the phone, and then post it to a web application (developed with Ruby on Rails).

I originally write my application in the wireless toolkit simulator, which works just fine. I then try transferring it to the phone and it doesn’t work anymore. The first problem was with the HTTP connection, which was a bit tricky, but it worked with some bit of tweaking around and asking Google. The other problem came because unfortunately the JSR-75 PIM/File connection API is not available on the phone.

Getting it work was quite complicated. The HTC Touch Cruise in its original firmware (SouthEast Asia version) runs Windows Mobile 6, with a preinstalled J2ME Midlet Manager called JBlend. A brief look at the chart here revealed that JBlend does not support the PIM API. Other midlet managers including the IBM WeMe J9 also doesn’t (it only supports the File Connection API, which is just half of the JSR-75). The other one named TAO Intent does, but it was a bit old and wasn’t quite recommended. So, I tried my luck with the Esmertec JBed midlet manager.

The installation was quite easy, as it is basically just another Windows Mobile application, coming in a neat .CAB installer. A query to Google found the installer put together by someone under the CloudyFa nickname, and the installation process was quite simple. At a glance, JBed looks faster and formats the interface forms better than the JBlend. The PIM API was also working, however it can only read one kind of data, which is the Contact List from the Phone Memory (contacts in the SIM were not read).

So, if you’re using Windows Mobile 6 on an HTC PDA phone and having trouble with the default midlet manager, you can try installing this alternate midlet manager, the Esmertec JBed. Other applications requiring disk acccess or PIM access will work better under this one, including the MGMaps (which can’t read stored maps under JBlend) as well as the Opera Mini (which can’t save or load pages without the JSR-75 FileConnection API).

-Andrian Kurniady