I don't know many of the dev details of J2ME personally, but I have encountered many blog posts and whatnot about how inconsistent development for it was. Ther

I don't know many of the dev details of J2ME personally, but I have encountered many blog posts and whatnot about how inconsistent development for it was. There were many runtimes, many different sets of available libraries, and many many unique bugs to work around - Java's "write once, run anywhere" at its absolute worst, basically. So "full" Java brought both a significant wave of standardization, and gained access to an utterly HUGE set of libraries, tools, and developers that were mostly unavailable before. So language-wise it's a somewhat small improvement as you are probably expecting. Android could have been another J2ME, and everything probably would've worked the same. But it greatly lowered the barriers to entry, which is basically a requirement for a large and active app ecosystem.