Conclusion
When J2ME was originally released, it was clearly a technology just a little ahead of its time. Devices with quality J2ME MIDP or CLDC implementations were nine months to a year away, with widespread adoption lingering six months after that, if you were lucky. To judge from the widespread availability of J2ME devices and the plethora of high-quality developer tools now available, J2ME's time has come!
Virtually all of the tools discussed in this article are available at very low prices (some for free), so nothing is holding you back from getting started with J2ME today. For developers with great ideas who are interested in making a buck from their J2ME app, developer programs run by carriers (such as Sprint PCS and DoCoMo) offer revenue-sharing agreements, complete with automated billing and provisioning of the application to the mobile device. To learn more about a program such as this (Sprint PCS's, in this case), visit http://developer.sprintpcs.com.