Enterprise-Grade Wireless Applications: just a gadget?

ACM Queue May issue features a survey article about wireless technologies in enterprise. Here, enterprise wireless application is defined as:

"...extend enterprise applications to wireless devices used by employees and clients"

I prefer the notion of "Mobile Enterprise Applications" for the same thing. Note that this does not encompass the wireless network infrastructure such as WiFi or WiMax or whatsoever; we are talking about running enterprise applications on handheld/cell phones to improve operational productivity and reduce cost. Some ISVs already begin to ship mobile CRM or ERP software. For example, iEnterprises Inc. has a CRM software running on RIM BlueBerry.

The article identifies the following challenges of developing, running, and supporting wireless enterprise applications:

• Devices; still no fit-all PDA. The market is segmented into consumer-centric feature-rich PDA and enterprise-centric PDA that is predominantly used for work as an extension to an enterprise application.
  
• Networking; for most applications, wireless data rate is not the problem; CPU and battery are the keys.
• Software; trend is the rise of monolithic system that integrates many otherwise separated systems. Well defined user interface and machine communication interface (XML and SOAP) are essential to mobile enterprise applications as well.
  
• Support nightmare
  
• Security; data security on the device (encryption?), on the server (Paris Hilton's T-Mobile story), and in transit (VPN, SSL, WiFi security, etc). Also, the solution must be easy to use.
  
• Uniformity; determine a standard set of requirements for evaluating offerings. "One such uniformity requirement that merits special mention is the partially offline scenario", which dictates that the wireless platform must insulate connection-oriented applications as seamlessly as possible from network interruption by emulating an always on and highly reliable network. Asynchronous connection and data push are needed.
  
• Manageability; company policing the usage of devices

Implementation issues include choosing the software model (the author suggests thin-client over browser based), choosing the programming platform (most likely a VM such as J2ME, Brew, or .Net Compact Framework), data caching, etc.

One thing worth noting is the author claims that
"J2ME and .Net CF share a common weakness,..., in that they do not assist developers with the "hard" problems of wireless development, such as solving the offline/partially offline issue, providing secure network transport, or integrating asynchronous push technology."

"J2ME and .Net CF share a common weakness,..., in that they do not assist developers with the "hard" problems of wireless development, such as solving the offline/partially offline issue, providing secure network transport, or integrating asynchronous push technology."

Is this true? As far as I know, .Net CF provides SqlDB to manage local data store, and has some classes for synchronization when the device is online. Don't know about J2ME in this regard.