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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

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gojomo·

If anyone has used the J2ME version of WhatsApp, can they describe how similar it is to the smartphone versions?

For example:

• Do you get a notification as soon as messages are waiting, even if the J2ME app hasn't been run recently?

• Are photo/video messages available?

• Are the group messaging options the same?

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Yes all of them work. Not just that they work surprisingly well. This is the best J2ME app that I have ever used on my phone.

Background notifications too?

I'm surprised - I wrote a Twitter client in 2009, and I couldn't find a way to make that work. I didn't think J2ME could do that at all, to be honest.

Even I dont know exactly how it works. I think Nokia gave them access to some private API.

J2ME is not Nokia specific.

No, but it is not uncommon for J2ME apps to have a different package for certain vendors, or even for specific series or models of certain vendors. Those packages often utilize vendor-specific APIs or work around limitations or quirks in their J2ME stack. Opera's J2ME application took this to extremes, with dozens of different versions of a specific release.

I know, once upon a time (2003), I did some J2ME development for Sharp and Nokia handsets.

Is the J2ME version of WhatsApp only available on Nokia devices?

Maybe some form of this... ?

http://www.javaworld.com/article/2071753/mobile-java/push-me...

Yep, that'd probably be it. You could listen out for SMS (on particular port), TCP and UDP connections if I remember correctly.

Yep, SMS push. I did some prototyping using this tech for a telco company here in Sydney back in, like, 2005 (9 years ago!). It actually worked quite well.

Same on Symbian. WhatsApp is easily one of the top 10 best applications available on Symbian. They are still pushing out updates too.

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