Series 30 and Symbian smartphones were quite successful in Europe and already offered most of the features that american consumers think that were "invented" by Apple.
The S30 does support J2ME, but its successor, the S30+ completely abandoned J2ME and replaced it with MRE. As for Symbian, J2ME wasn't even the primary development platform - it was C++/Qt.
Also, court documents in the Oracle/Google trial also showed that Oracle tried to develop a Java smartphone and failed repeatedly because of their, and I quote from a internal Oracle presentation slide, "Very limited internal expertise to make smart decisions".
>How much Symbian development have you done? Many small companies were doing J2ME on Symbian as a way to write portable code across multiple devices.
None, but this doesn't change the fact that C++/Qt was the main development platform. I'd also wager that the C++/Qt apps were vastly superior to the J2ME apps.
>As for the Series 30+, the MRE was a market failure, never reaching a fraction of J2ME, Mediatek doesn't even support the SDK anymore.
Well, at least they're still making S30+ phones. The S30 stopped production in 2013.
So vastly superior that no mobile OS has been successfully with C++/QT on the market.
Symbian C++ alongside J2ME were vastly more used than C++/Qt ever was.
The adoption of C++/Qt was still being ramped up when the switch to Windows Phone 7 took place. Qt Mobility APIs were still work in progress just as an example.
Actually this angered many Symbian developers as they were still evaluating the transition to C++/Qt SDK when the news came out.
