Are there any real life uses for the Java byte primitive type?

Question

For some inexplicable reason the byte primitive type is signed in Java. This mean that valid values are -128..127 instead of the usual 0..255 range representin

Answer 1

I used it frequently when I was programming software and games for J2ME. On most J2ME-devices, you have limited resources, so storing for example the map of a level in a byte-array is less resource-intensive than storing it in an int-array.