Raise Your Glass To BREW! - Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless - Company Business and Marketing

Computer Technology Review, March, 2001 by Joshua Piven

The new wireless development platform. May it be great tasting and less filling.

As the personal computer market experiences its first major slowdown in nearly ten years, both consumers and analysts are starting to pay more attention to wireless devices. Indeed, worldwide sales of mobile phones have dwarfed those of PCs over the past few years, with tens of millions of units sold in Europe alone.

But even as wireless carriers pay billions to snap up new wireless frequencies (see the February issue of CTR), some observers feel the market for wireless handsets is now ripe for a slowdown as well. Ericsson, at one time the heir apparent to Motorola's wireless crown, has announced that it will no longer build mobile handsets; Flextronics International of Singapore will handle its manufacturing. Nokia--which sold 128 million handsets last year and is now the world's largest mobile phone maker--has warned of a soft first half of 2001 owning to delayed rollout of third-generation (3G) wireless service. Such advanced, high-speed connections, based on the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), are not likely to be widely available until at least this fall in Europe; Nokia expects to ship its new GPRS phones at that time.

What's a mobile phone company to do? Perhaps more than any other technology sector, the mobile phone business is beholden to its service infrastructure: without reliable service, mobile phones don't sell. The delay in the deployment of 3G services means that users will simply keep their existing phones without upgrading, and new users will not purchase vendors' newest models, with their attendant price premiums. So, as is often the case in the PC business, hardware makers are looking to software, trying to create value and profits by creating application software that developers and carriers will use to sell new services to consumers.

BREW Meister

Regardless of their current financial woes, mobile phone makers have a rosy future, according to market research firm Cahners In-Stat Group. Analysts at the firm predict sales of Internet-ready wireless phones, which are the most popular mobile access devices, will surpass 1 billion annually by 2004. By as soon as the end of 2002, virtually all wireless phones will be pre-loaded with mini browsers and will be Internet-enabled.

One of the newest players to join the rush to wireless software is Qualcomm Corp. Qualcomm has long been the dominant player in the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) market, and its CDMA chips and integrated circuits are licensed to most of the leading makers of handset hardware, including Fujitsu, Hitachi, Hyundai, LG, Samsung, and Toshiba, among many others. But like other hardware manufacturers, sluggish handset sales can potentially wreak havoc on the company's bottom line. So, as a hedge against the fluctuating mobile phone market, Qualcomm has developed a new software platform for mobile services, which it hopes will allow developers and wireless carriers to build compelling new applications for wireless devices.

Qualcomm's new development platform is called Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless--or BREW. BREW will enable developers to build applications that operate on any handset that uses Qualcomm's CDMA chipsets. BREW is a software layer that sits between the chip's system software and an application, enabling the application to use the phone's functionality without necessarily requiring the developer to have the chip system source code--or even a direct relationship with the phone manufacturer (see Figure). In essence, developers could create a broad base of applications that could be used in any phone with Qualcomm's chips, regardless of who actually builds the handset itself.

"If you think about the PC world, users add, update, and delete applications all the time," says Qualcomm's Jeremy James, director of marketing for the company's new Internet Services division. "This is not the case with wireless handsets. If a user doesn't like the applications on the phone, chances are he will simply dislike the phone itself. BREW exposes the underlying power in the device's chipset to developers and enables applications to access functions in a standard way, so apps can be added, removed, or changed by the user."

Of course, James acknowledges that in the wireless world, unlike the PC world, users are beholden to their service providers; the application in question must be supported if it's going to work with a particular phone. What Qualcomm hopes BREW will do is enable developers to write, and then brand, new applications, which will then be bought or licensed by carriers. Qualcomm will benefit in two ways: it will provide a middleware solution for application management, and it will obviously bring in revenue if its new application development model creates applications that help to sell more phones. "The software itself is free," James says, "but it can certainly make CDMA-based services more attractive, which ultimately helps Qualcomm." (The company will not charge a licensing fee for Mobile Shop, the software that helps manufacturers integrate new apps with their phones.)