Mobile moves towards BREW

20-12-2004

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As Ireland's mobile application developers grow their reputation for excellence and creativity, they will seek new markets and segments to expand into. But something is BREWing.

With over 1 billion people around the world using GSM phones, and with GSM and related technologies like GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment) accounting for almost three quarters of the world's mobile networks, it would seem that application developers would be best served putting all of their eggs into the massive GSM basket.

companies interested in newer, more powerful networks capable of supporting more powerful applications should look to CDMA

Doing so would be a mistake, according to two speakers who presented at Enterprise Ireland's Technology Roadmap Series event, entitled "CDMA Mobile Applications -- What is the Industry Roadmap?" Aaron Bernstein, Senior Project Manager, BREW Developer Relations with Qualcomm Internet Services, and one of the speakers at the event, notes that about 127 million mobile subscribers globally make calls and send text messages on mobile networks based on CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access), a standard created by Qualcomm. More significantly, emerging third-generation (3G) networks the world over will be based on variants of CDMA, including W-CDMA in Europe and Japan, as well as cdma2000 1X, 1X-EV-DV, 1X EV-DO, and cdma2000 3X in other parts of the world.

The GSM market, without a doubt, will continue to represent a fertile revenue stream for mobile application developers, but companies interested in newer, more powerful networks capable of supporting more powerful applications should look to CDMA.

At the event, Bernstein, along with Dublin-based Upstart Games managing director Barry O'Neill, painted a vibrant picture of the CDMA mobile applications market today and in the future. At the heart of this burgeoning market is a platform called BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), which was created by Qualcomm for developing and distributing mobile applications.

Brewing mobile applications

Indeed BREW is regarded as the gateway for any application developer looking to gain a foothold in the existing CDMA market, and according to Bernstein, the platform will be an equally important gateway for developers looking forward to wide scale deployment of 3G in Europe, the Americas or Asia. He also argues that application developers accustomed to working with the J2ME (Java 2 Platform Micro Edition) platform -- which is typically associated with GSM/GPRS in the same way that BREW is seen as a CDMA technology -- would also benefit by sharpening-up their understanding of BREW.

if you are writing in Java for the GSM market, you can also write in Java for BREW phones on CDMA

Aaron Bernstein, Qualcomm

"The fact is, BREW does not need to run on a CDMA or Qualcomm chipset. BREW is radio frequency agnostic... We have designed this as an open technology, so it can run on any phone," Bernstein commented. "Since BREW, on the client, sits between the application itself and the ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) level software, it can support applications written in Java (J2ME), or C, or C++."

"In other words," Bernstein explained, "if you are writing in Java for the GSM market, you can also write in Java for BREW phones on CDMA."

BREW's star is rising and the numbers prove it. By November 2004, there were some 40 million BREW-enabled handsets on the market, compared to 14 million a year earlier. The growth in BREW handsets has led to boom in downloads of BREW-based applications -- including mobile games -- hitting 200 million in November 2004 compared to just 60 million 12 months earlier. More importantly, additional mobile operators have caught the BREW bug with a total of 37 -- including the likes of Verizon and KDDI -- offering BREW downloads and services to customers, compared with only 13 in November 2003.

Upstart Games, a Dublin-based company and a BREW developer, is aiming to capitalise on the trend in the CDMA market and is targeting consumers interested in mobile video games, including classics from Konomi such as "Frogger" and "Castlevania." Already 60 percent of the company's revenue comes from games downloads to CDMA subscribers, Upstart Games' Managing Director Barry O'Neill said at the Enterprise Ireland Technology Roadmap event.

"When we were getting started, we had expertise in Java (J2ME), so when we looked at CDMA operators in the US, we thought it was natural, and we thought it would be easier, to deploy our games with Sprint PCS, which is the only CDMA operator in the US to use Java instead of BREW," O'Neill said.

In reality, Upstart found it easier to sell to operators that are part of Qualcomm's BREW Extranet, an online marketplace and billing system for BREW applications.

"We can now turn around a game in couple of weeks," O'Neill added , noting that the firm has a solid grasp of the BREW Extranet, APIs and SDK, as well as a better grasp of what operators want and what will sell to consumers. This understanding of the marketplace was been gleaned over just a few months, in part because Qualcomm's BREW Global Publishers (BGP) Programme allows companies, like Upstart, the freedom to produce and publish games at a pace that best suits the developer's timescale and ability, while still giving operators what they require -- a wide variety of games from a large pool of publishers.