It was, but it was next to impossible to get a half decent application released on any J2ME phone not to mention the impossible fragmentation (compare to the J2ME beast the Android fragmentation is a sweet tamed puppy).
Java is also installed on a bazillion desktops, numbers don't change the fact that the ui framework is very bad.
Historically applets lost to flash for that same reason
I went to the American consulte in Tel - Aviv about a week after they've changed the Visa procedure and had a missing form. The consulte did had a couple of PC's but non of them could access an email account.
I wondered to the street and found a coffee shop next to the consulte that provided all the services you'll need, lockers (this part is strange since you can't pretty much bring anything to the consulte e.g. a mobile phone lockers are essentials, I know that other consultes like the one in Sydney provides lockers), printer, and for a fee will feel up your forms.
So this isn't a new idea, but its an interesting phenomenon.
BTW
I got my visa, and I must admit that the consulate service was outstanding
Depends on which side, from the mother side by law you'll receive nationality on the spot, from the father's side you'll only experience the brutal pain of the politics in Israel.
It's a very smart move by Rim. This is sort of NT4 supports POSIX scenario, having say that I'm not fooling myself there will be some porting considerations how bad they are only time will tell.
The locations names in Israel are phonetic translations and not their English names (e.g. Yerushalayim translates to Jerusalem) wonder how they got it?
I was participating in a developers survey by Rim around a year ago (one of those where they grab 10 engineers and put them in a room for some cash) and the complaints were exactly the same!
That's the fun about Android, its a real mass market open OS and all the bugs are visible!!! Too bad its not for everyone to fix (or maybe its actually good?)
A year ago I had a gig for a big name prototyping an Android tablet. The message that was passed from other vendors was that Goggle were that they aren't looking into tablets. The project was cancelled. How wrong they were...
When Android 1.0 was released a lot of vendors approached it with caution, 2 years down the road same story again...