You might recall I mentioned a few days ago the minor flurry of interest around writing Java apps for the Samsung Instinct, a spiffy new phone considered something of an iPhone-killer (side note: if your product is primarily known as a “[leading product in its field]-killer”, it is probably not destined for greatness). One can understand the excitement, especially considering the fact that Sprint is running a contest for Instinct developers with a $20,000 cash prize. From the overall Java perspective, though, there’s one catch: Java apps written for the Instinct won’t run anywhere else, and Java apps written to Java ME standards won’t run on the instinct. The problem is that the Instinct is a touch-screen phone, and, rather incredibly, Java ME’s UI libraries cannot deal with touchscreen phones. So Sprint cooked up some proprietary workarounds for features like entering text. Sprint promises to release an over-the-air update that will rectify matters in the next month, but still, how many developers will want to futz around with proprietary extensions that won’t work on other platforms? Software Development