I agree with @dscho  for a number of reasons:
* I'd rather avoid allocating memory not managed by the VM in a non-local fashion
* The approach pointed out below (reading directly into the byte buffer) should be more performant (and not require any native allocations)
* Java methods can easily be stripped out at build time by proguard, but there's no such tool for jni methods - so I'd like to minimize the latter.