General cell phone game and app question

I'm trying to figure out a little more about how cell phone games (and apps for that matter I believe) work behind the scenes.  My main motivation for this is some frustration.  I had a Motorola Razr V3i phone which I used it's browser to purchache 3 games.  I told the phone to put the games on the 512Mb memory card.  All seemed to work well on the V3i, expecting that it was a very slow processor phone.  I noticed that most (all?) of the games brought up a JAVA splash screen before running, so I assume some kind of JAVA virutal machine was loaded on the phone to allow the games to work.

So I then upgraded my cellphone to a newer, much faster processor V3xx.  I assumed (incorrectly) that I could just move the 512Mb flash card to the new phone, and the new phone would pick up my games, yet run much faster on the newer, faster processor.  To my surprise, my pictures and video moved with the flash card just fine, but the games were no where to be found.  Even if I conneted my "Motorola Phone Tools" PC app to the USB port and browsed the flash card memory, I could find no trace of the 3 games I *purchased* on the older phone.

I am curious to learn if this is just a plain and simple example of how the cell phone companies and cell phone game developers have structured the system: they simply have some method, behind the scenes, to key license the games so they only work on the phone they were downloded upon, and that cell phone users, like myself, need to realize that when you buy a cell phone game, you are only going to be able to use it for the lifetime of that phone; which in today's market will probably not be very long.

Is this just a conscious buisness decision or is it an inherent technological barrier?  In other words, am I correct in assuming that my game *could* easily run on a JAVA VM on my new phone?  Why can't I even see any of the game files when I browse the flash file structure?  Are they hidden.

Maybe you get the gist of my question.  You might understand too, that I come from a PC background where I have come to expect that when I buy a software license, once I buy a new PC (of course it will be faster) I will just move the software to the new PC.  Except for incompatibility issues I have always come to expect that.  Heck, I can probably run a fair number of MS-DOS programs even now under Windows-XP (maybe even Vista).

For what it's worth, I find the general landscape of the cellphone "extras" like games, apps, and web access financially exploitive and confusing.

I apprecaite any feedback that can help me understand technologically what the limitations are and what I can expect when I buy a cellphone game.

Regards,
Gordon
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