Three cheers for the new Java Store (though I can’t see as I’m in Northern Ireland, can’t sign up, can’t join, well not for the time being). From reading press releases and the rest it sounds good on paper but I’m far from convinced that Sun can actually deliver.

Eric Klein said,“We’re building new business opportunities and are thrilled to launch the Java Store to connect developers with hundreds of millions of Java users. The Java Store will become the destination for the most interesting, useful and entertaining Java software and content.”

And here starts the main point of the issue. Not everyone with a Java runtime knows they have a Java runtime. It’s all very well to say there’s 2.4M mobile devices but out of those how many truely know they have Java on the phone and they can download stuff. Not 2.4 million for sure. Set top boxes are another good example, I don’t know many who can download software for them, so it’s all very well saying there’s 800M of them.

At present the Java Store is a big marketing exercise from what I can see. It’s a good idea and I desperately want to believe it will work. Everyone is looking at Nokia Ovi and a bit of a tramsmash launch. I’d hate to see the Java Store go the same way. We’re going to end up with an app store deluge and the single one fact remains, Apple is doing it better than anyone else regardless of whether you like Apple or not.