Sun Microsystems announced that it is acquiring the assets of SavaJe Technologies and will reveal further details at its JavaOne conference next month. SavaJe’s claim to fame is its Java-based embedded operating system, which was shown running in a mobile phone at JavaOne last May.

SavaJe touts its Java-based mobile phone OS as being built from the kernel up for Java, but not “Java on bare metal,” since a small multi-tasking, multi-threaded kernel manages the hardware resources and sits below the JVM.

The deal could potentially place Sun–whose Java technology resides in hundreds of millions of mobile phones already–squarely in competition with the major mobile phone OS players: Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux.