Midlet connectivity via broadband or GPRS

Question

Midlet using HttpConnection to connect a webservice application.

A mobile can use a wireless broadband to connect to internet or can use internet facility provided by the network provider i.e. Vodafone or Virgin which is I think known as GPRS. Correct me if my understanding is wrong.

Now my question is when the midlet will run which connectivity it will use? Secondly do I need to code differently for midlet to use GPRS or it doesn't matter?

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I deployed my application on Nokia E65 and it asked me which connection to use. The mobile had both wireless lan and provider GPRS active.

On IPhone the preference is for wireless lan. (Not related to J2me)

Answer 1

It depends on the client mobile phone. On some models, there is only one GPRS configuration that is used by all applications including midlets, On some others the configuration used for browsing can be different than the one used by midlets.

Answer 2

There is no standard Access Point Selection APi in J2ME.

That means the MIDlet itself can't decide whether to use Wi-Fi or GPRS.

Some phones will allow the user to change application settings in order to force a MIDlet to use a specific network when it is available (and maybe prompt the user for an alternative when the preferred network is not available).

This is mostly because there is no standard way to describe a wireless network that contains enough information : QoS, cost per byte downloaded and uploaded, average bitrate, ping time...

In most cases, the logic to automatically choose a network without those information would be too complicated and not reliable enough.

Manual Access Point selection is the only way to put the user in charge of the cost of data transfer, so far.