You’ll have to forgive me: it’s actually Tech Pundit law that I work some kind of iPad reference into my blog this week. So, that iPad, huh? Pretty cool! And totally devoid of Java, obviously, like the rest of the iPhone OS platform. Does this mean that Java is soon to be pushed out of mobile, forever?Well, no. If you want to see some fun stats on smartphone usage, check these out: they indicate that the very Java-oriented BlackBerry is still an enormously important player — RIM just announced a new set of BlackBerry development tools — and the in-the-Java family Android OS is also making big gains. There might even be a new iteration of the Java-based DangerOS (though this might only be a transition on the road to Windows Mobile 7).So why the cool factor with the iPhone family? Well, a lot of people believe that the media is just wowed by anything Apple. I think this can be overstated; but to the extent that it’s true, it’s true because Apple is a consumer company, and most media types — and their readers — are consumers. The BlackBerry more or less invented the smartphone category — but it’s always been beloved by a high-powered business and political types who use it to stay constantly in contact for business. It’s not the joyful thing that the iPhone is — the nickname “crackberry” indicates a certain love/hate relationship — and its core messaging features probably get a lot more use than its array of Java-based apps. Then there’s the fact that iPhone OS is an obviously coherent platform that people — especially non-techies — can recognize and understand. As for all of those platforms I just described above — how many people know that there’s a single platform under all that plumbing? There’s no cool factor to something that’s invisible.From the developer perspective, too, there’s the problem that all of these Java-based environments have their own quirks to develop for; the iPhone ecosystem, being relatively new, is also relatively monolithic, and therefore easier to build apps for. The existence of tools like J2Android, transforming one kind of Java application into another, demonstrates how fragmented mobile Java is. There’s presumably money to be made by slogging through yet another semi-compatible mobile Java platform, but there’s nothing fun or cool about it. Technology Industry