Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy said he was misquoted in a South Korean newspaper earlier this week as saying Sun and mobile manufacturer Samsung are working on an iPhone-killer.
McNealy, who delivered a speech at the World Business Forum in New York yesterday, said that the newspaper must have misunderstood a translation of what he had said.
"I never said that," he said. "I'm not really sure where they got that. I think it was a translation problem."
When pressed further during an interview with ZDNet Australia's sister site CNET News.com, McNealy would provide further comment.
"We haven't announced anything," he said.
The company has not announced any official partnership with Samsung, but a representative for the phone maker told the Associated Press after the misinterpreted quote had been circulated that the companies are working together.
Sun, which already provides a stripped-down version of Java for billions of mobile phones sold around the world, announced in May a more robust version of its Java software called JavaFX Mobile.
It's geared toward small devices like smartphones that have more processing power than the average mobile. Unlike the Java Micro Edition, the JavaFX Mobile software is most similar to the Java Standard Edition (SE) software used by standard PCs.
With this more powerful software, Samsung and its partners could develop applications for mobiles that more closely resemble those running on PCs. This means Web surfing and interactive mobile games would more closely resemble a desktop-like experience.
Apple has already attempted to do this with its iPhone, which allows people to shrink and magnify Web pages so that the pages render on the screen just as they do on a regular computer.
CNET News.com's Marguerite Reardon reported from San Francisco.
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