Raise Your Glass To BREW!

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.)

BREW Me Some Apps

In theory, all this means that applications created with BREW might be so small and portable that users could download them using their wireless service and install them on-the-fly, immediately adding new functionality to their phones. "A user might fly into a new city and instantly download mapping and GPS software to help him get around," says James.

"It seems that Qualcomm is positioning BREW as a development environment that will allow handset manufacturers and carriers to quickly put applications out to phones," agrees Terry Nozick, a Mobile Insight analyst who follows the wireless telecommunications market. "[The company] is attempting to set a standard where one currently does not exist, and I think that's a good thing," Nozick continues. "[They have] existing relationships with the carriers already, and are now offering them something that they can in turn make money off of, because it allows the carriers to quickly deliver services to end users and charge for those services."

Nozick says that BREW applications will sit right on top of the phone's OS, eliminating lengthy development work and protracted negotiations with individual handset manufacturers. "It appears to be a win-win situation here," she notes, "where Qualcomm makes money selling the BREW technology to carriers and manufacturers, and carriers can quickly deliver 'value-adds' to end users and also make money [from them]."

Who Will BREW?

Of course, applications that work with or run on the network will require the support of the wireless carrier, but Qualcomm says it intends to get the support of major carriers over the next several months. To date, the company has secured memorandums of understanding (though not service agreements) with Japan's KDDI, Korea Telecom Freetel (KTF), LEAP and Verizon Wireless in the United States, and Mexico's Pegaso. Qualcomm also has MOUs with some wireless app developers, including NetZero, MP3.com, AvantGo, fusionOne, Wireless Knowledge, and Visto, among others.

The initial release of the BREW platform and the BREW SDK (available to no charge from Qualcomm) supports CDMA only; the company says it is preparing to enable BREW for other wireless technologies, though this will require cooperation from GSM and TDMA chip makers. BREW will support several development languages, according to Qualcomm, though native C/C++ applications will run most efficiently on the platform. BREW will also support integration of Java applications (provided a Java VM is available on the device) and browsers (WAP, cHTML).

Qualcomm's solution is not the only one brewing for wireless phones, of course. The closest competitor, at least in terms of native application platforms for mobile devices, is Symbian Quartz, which is based on EPOC and is aimed at the handheld market. Developers can use WAP, C++, and Java to write Quartz-based applications, and such apps can run on TCP/IP, WAP, GSM, Bluetooth, IrDA, and serial connections. More to the point, however, are the companies that sit on Symbian's board: Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Panasonic, and Psion are all represented. But one critical difference is that Symbian's solution runs on high-end, GSM-based "smart" phones (the Ericsson R380s, the forthcoming Nokia 9210 Communicator) while Qualcomm hopes that BREW--which is less than 100KB for a full implementation--will be used even on low-end phones. "The constraints on phones at this end of the market are greatest," says Qualcomm's James, "but the low end is also the fattest part of the market."

Mobile Insight analyst Tim Scannell believes that Qualcomm is fairly unique among phone chip makers in getting into the in-house software development business. "Most of the other companies are sticking with hardware and will adopt such things as Java (J2E), Symbian, and eventually BREW as development environments," Scannell notes. He adds that Kyocera-- which has used BREW on its newest phone, the 3035--is doing some development work, but most of this is on the chip level. "There may be some competition from Microsoft and its Stinger development," Scannell says, "but by far, the most interesting company--politically--is Motorola, since there is some speculation about how far it will get involved in Symbian--and away from Java."

BREWing Some Chai

Indeed, it does appear that BREW will at least compete with Java in some OEM implementations. Qualcomm and Hewlett Packard have announced that the companies are working to integrate HP's new version of the Chai VM for mobile devices, called MicrochaiVM, with BREW. MicrochaiVM is a smaller footprint version of HP's Java-like runtime environment that, according to company officials, conforms to Sun's Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) standard for Java devices. (Recall that while Chai will run Java-compatible apps, HP has thus far refused to submit Chai to Sun's vetting and licensing process for Java.) According to HP, MicrochaiVM will also support the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) later this year. MicrochaiVM has a minimum ROM requirement of 37KB, and the full CLDC implementation requires less than 128KB of ROM.

No market would be complete without an offering from Microsoft, of course, and the PC giant has been developing Stinger, its operating system for mobile phones, for more than a year. According to Becky Diercks, director of wireless research at Cahners In-Stat, Mitsubishi plans to release smart phones running Stinger under the Trium brand in late 2001 for GSM and GPRS networks.

Using Stinger, automatic updates to voicemail, email, and Web services can be conducted wirelessly and synched. With an ARM processor starting at 60MHz, a phone based on Stinger can theoretically have up to 100 hours of standby time with the screen and the PIM active and four hours of talk time. The phone will weigh less than 110 grams and offer a resolution of up to 208 x 240 pixels. The phone also will offer ring tones, support for foreign languages, and support for expansion options including SD, SSFDC, and Memory Sticks. Paxton says that a phone based on Stinger software is radio link-agnostic, meaning it can be built to work on any air interface.

"The bad news is that they are trying to force-fit Windows CE into a phone again," Diercks notes ruefully. "I have seen a mock-up of this phone, however, and I must say I was impressed. It has a nice design, a nice color, and is lightweight. If we had a GSM/GPRS network in the United States, I would want to try one." Microsoft believes the phone will retail for $300 to $400.

But regardless of who actually ends up using Qualcomm's BREW technology and who votes for Stinger, next-gen mobile devices are becoming so complex architecturally that a standard method of programming applications for them would be welcome relief for developers. Since the average time to market for a new mobile phone is still an unacceptable 18 months, any technology that can shave six months off this protracted development period is likely to make waves in an already roily market.