Sony-Ericsson has announced the new phone C905, the first phone supporting the project Capuchin (which define a bridge between J2ME and Flash). It is also equipped with an 8.1 megapixels camera and GPS. The screen resolution is 320x240.

It belongs to the JP-8 Sony-Ericsson family and it introduces a new subset called JP-8.4 which includes the phones of the JP-8 family supporting the project Capuchin.
It will be available on the selected markets during Q4 2008.

Sony-Ericsson builds the J2ME-Flash Lite bridge

Sony Ericsson is going to make possible a bridge between Flash Lite and J2ME on their own devices. The project called Capuchin is a Java ME API that makes it possible to use Flash Lite for the UI design and use Java for the phone services available.

In fact, Flash Lite can't access to the complete set of features that Java can.

The project will include Flash Lite content in J2ME applications. In that way, the developers can build a rich and beautiful UI thanks to Flash Lite and use the power of the Java virtual machine in terms of structure, security and services. The technology will be available during the second half of 2008 and it will be free.

The project works in a way that J2ME applications can run a Flash Lite content file (with swf extension) which is shown on the display. The system events (like key events for example) are forwarded from Java to Flash that can catch and use these events.

When Flash wants to use some services it communicates with Java through a translator API which work in both the directions (translations for request from Flash to Java and for answer from Java to Flash).

Another advantage of the project is that a fully Flash Lite application can be seen as a Java application and that means that the infrastracture to provide Java application can be used to provide also Flash Lite application without any change.

Here is an architectural view of the project taken from the Sony-Ericsson web site: