Yesterday, I attended a number of sessions on MSA (Mobile Services Architecture). I didn't hear big announcements, I didn't see real flashy demo's, but the important message is that devices with MSA are shipping right now.
This is great news for Java Mobile developers. It has been a long and painful track, where developers had to develop using vendor-specific API's, not knowing whether their applications would work on other phones. With the first release of MSA, a number of profiles are being defined (the word "profile" is back: I heard this in a number of JavaOne presentations) .
When you use the full MSA stack, you can leverage e.g. the Location API (JSR 179). A number of JSR's are not available in the subset of MSA, but at least the specification is now very clear on what is expected from phones that claim to be compliant with MSA or the MSA subset.
Meanwhile, MSA 2 is being specified, but don't expect anything soon.
Johan's blog 