A MIDlet is built for resource limited devices, such as pagers, personal digital assistants (PDA) and phones. As cell phones outpaced other devices, and games made up the majority of these applications, MIDlets became associated with Java games on cell phones.

Java’s main challenge was to facilitate the use of applications on devices with constrained resources. Cell phones that support MIDlets have small displays, slow central processing units (CPU), small memory, ordinary keypads and minimal connectivity features.

A MIDlet is normally deployed as a suite composed of a Java Archive (.jar) file and a Java Application Descriptor (.jad) file. For security reasons, a MIDlet cannot modify itself or the runtime environment and cannot escape the runtime environment.

There are various MIDlet installation methods, as follows:

• Direct method: Entails the use of a connection between the development computer and device. Although the most commonly used connection medium is data cable, employing wireless connections, like Bluetooth and infrared (IR), is also possible.
• Over-the-air (OTA) provisioning: The MIDlet is uploaded to a Web server and accessed via the target device’s built-in browser. Because anyone can access the MIDlet at any time, this method is ideal for large scale deployments.