At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Sun Microsystems announced plans to roll out a high end cellphone built on the Java platform.  The phone is expected to compete with other all-in-one devices like the iphone and Blackberry.  The phone will feature a full desktop operating system.

This “innovation” by Sun seems to me like a sad attempt at boosting its stock price.  Sun as a company has been in the doldrums for years.  Java never really took off like they expected it would, and with the introduction of all these Web 2.0 applications, it looks as those Just-in-time computing via a java applet is going to be a distant memory.  If it wasn’t for its huge debt load, lack of new product growth, diminishing margins in the server business, Sun probably would have merged already with a larger, sexier company.  I’ll be following the jphone closely, but my guess is that its not going anywhere.