A Strong BREW

By Mark Beaulieu

July 4, 2005

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BREW makes cell phones interesting. Hold one in the air and it will listen to a song and figure out the title, album and band. If you have a diabetes problem, you can press a finger to the back of a cell phone battery to check stress levels with its biometric sensor. If you're a game player, you can tilt a camera phone about as the gamespace turns with the phone. All these phone applications are made possible by BREW.

BREW stands for Binary Runtime for Wireless Environment; it was developed by Qualcomm. It runs as a process above a cell phone operating system and executes applications written to the BREW programming interface. BREW is sometimes compared to Java, but BREW is not a language. In fact some BREW applications are written in Java. BREW is more like Windows, or more precisely .NET; both require an operating system. (All cell phones have operating systems, usually with names like Rex.) BREW is a standardized software application programming interface (API). Unlike other cell phone environments, BREW is also a distribution service. It is available on cell phones offered by 45 carriers in 24 countries worldwide.

Cellular computing is quite different from personal computing, and cellular has come a long way. Computation is now becoming communication as the CPU and radio are cast in one microplane. The new chips and devices are unique, and so is the wireless network. Consider that as a cell device moves about it must disconnect and reconnect smoothly, with hand-off protocols unknown in the computer world.

There is far more going on in a cell phone than in a PC CPU. Cellular chips sport a DSP (digital signal processor); more than one antenna; WAN, LAN, and PAN radio modems; industrial power management; 3D graphics; Global Positioning; MIDI; voice codecs; and audio, picture and video capture. What's the best way to program all this capability?

Although Java leads in numbers, I'd argue that BREW is the technical leader, giving a unified, portable programming environment for the entire suite of mobile features.

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