J2ME is an unprecise term. I'd guess they mean J2ME/MIDP. The other profiles did even fly less probably.

I remember from the early 2000s you could get railway time tables from the German railways for your selected pair of stations as a midlet. That was truly useful.

I also used a mobile browser frontend. The data was rendered by the backend and transferred in compressed form. That was very usable at 2G speeds. Of course JavaScript was rare at the time. But I don't think the product was any commercial success.

Of cause their were (mostly toy) games. But in general the technology was probably 10+ years too early for the market.

J2ME was my first experience with mobile app development. It was very direct and easy to program for! But it definitely needed testing on the different devices. We had an array of different phones to test on. And some definitely had a nicer implementation than others.

The Java it supported was very old fashioned, with no generics. Which was a pain at times.

This brings back memories, as someone that start developing for mobile phones targeting Sharp GX 10 for a Vodafone competition.

https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/vodafone-gx10

I actually made money from selling a midlet via the Singtel marketplace. Not a lot but it was a good experience actually getting something to production outside of normal work.

so we've had some success getting libbluray with java working on android (i.e. needed for bluray's java support), but that requires an entire jvm built for android (heavy). I've always wondered if a j2me emulator (as bluray's java spec is built on top of j2me as I understand it), would be an easier way.

I remember one of my senior colleagues (I was just an internship) making a J2ME app to calculate who should pay the coffee for others.

Oh the memories, J2ME.

I got super interested with these in high school, because I finally got a Nokia N73 and that phone had the best and most complete J2ME implementation.

But I only had a netbook (atom cpu, 1gb ram, rotational hard disk) so I ended up coding J2ME using Emacs, a poorly written ant buildfile (due to my poor understanding of Ant) and the J2ME javadoc in a browser.

Those were the times, for me.

Oh to be young again...