SavaJe

» see savaje.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

SavaJe Technologies spun out of Lucent in 1999, built by people who had worked on Inferno at Bell Labs, and it took on the one promise Java had never been allowed to keep. Not a virtual machine sandboxed on top of somebody else's operating system, reaching the hardware through a keyhole of permitted calls, but the whole stack in Java above a kernel small enough to count as an implementation detail. Swing on a handset. The dialer written in the same language as the games.

The first product was SavaJe XE in November 2001, a hundred dollars a license, running on Compaq's iPAQ. Phones came next and so did money: about $71 million by the company's own count, from Ridgewood Capital and RRE Ventures and from the venture arms of Vodafone and Orange. The trade press put the total nearer $120 million. A late $40 million round led by Investcorp Technology Ventures was a great deal of conviction to place in a platform that had never put a phone in a shop.

The Java I had met by 2006 was a menu item. You pulled a jar file down over GPRS, it owned the screen for as long as it ran, and it could not see the phone it was running on. SavaJe was building the far end of the same word, and hardly anyone got to hold the result. The one device that existed in any number was a developer unit handed out at a conference, and within a few months of that the people who wrote its operating system were being asked to use up their vacation days.

~ the case file ~

~ java on the metal ~

The claim was specific enough to check. SavaJe exposed a multitasking Java virtual machine and nothing above it, with no native operating system in the ordinary sense, and the scope was desktop Java rather than the cut-down mobile edition, down to a full implementation of Swing. Tim Bray, who actually had one of the phones, wrote in June 2006 that more or less everything the device could do was Java-programmable. On any other handset of the period that sentence was false by design, because the telephony sat behind a C runtime that the Java could only ask politely.

Bare metal was marketing, strictly speaking. The Jasper had a kernel written in C underneath it, out of the Inferno lineage, and the architecture was a simplification rather than an absence. The accurate version of the claim is that everything a developer could reach was Java.

~ the jasper s20 ~

The phone was unveiled at JavaOne in San Francisco in May 2006, and Sun named it Device of the Show. Group Sense PDA in Hong Kong built the hardware around an ARM9 at roughly 150 MHz, with 32 MB of memory where rivals were using 64 or 128. The screen was 2.2 inches at 176 by 220 and the whole thing weighed 110 grams. It was supposed to reach Asian markets that summer.

What existed by August 2006 was a developer's version. Only two handsets ever ran the platform at all, the other being an LG model announced back in 2004 that no source can confirm ever reached a shop, and the trade press afterwards read the S20 as a proof of concept built to attract manufacturers. Eight weeks after it was written up with a full spec table, the furloughs started.

~ what the operators were really doing ~

In February 2006, with the collapse eight months out, George Grey gave an interview that explains the whole arc. He conceded that part of the operators' interest in SavaJe had been to hold it over Nokia as a threat on handset personalization. Vodafone and Orange had both put money in through their venture arms, which is a different relationship from buying something, and neither ever launched a phone that ran it.

The idea had been tried and lost before, in Sun's own JavaOS and in Swisscom's Blue Horizon, which The Register pointed out the week the company went quiet. On 12 April 2007 Sun signed for the intellectual property, told the market the transaction was immaterial to earnings per share, and folded the code into JavaFX Mobile, which was a Java stack running on a Linux kernel. That was the arrangement SavaJe had existed to avoid, and JavaFX Mobile is dead too.

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