Qualcomm Trying To Get Brew Back Into Korea

Qualcomm was forced to retreat somewhat from South Korea earlier this year, when carriers there decided to switch away from the BREW content platform in favor of the open (and much cheaper) WIPI platform. Qualcomm's now trying to force its way back in to South Korea by adding WIPI support to BREW in an attempt to re-establish it there. South Korean operators seem to be doing pretty well without BREW, so why would they want to go back to it? This seems like an awful lot like Qualcomm adding Java support to BREW, which sounded pretty nice but in reality, hasn't had much of an impact. Perhaps part of the problem is that some operators are leery of handing over so much control of the ecosystem to Qualcomm -- when they've got a perfectly capable content distribution platform in WIPI, there's no real reason to restart BREW, then run WIPI on top of it.
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  1. icon
    Derek Kerton (profile), 28 Nov 2005 @ 9:22am

    No Soup For You

    The two reasons for creating WIPI: 1) standardize handset platforms to accelerate the development of new handsets. 2) Reduce payments to Qualcomm. WIPI was designed, in large part, to replace BREW. Plain and simple. The Koreans were sick and tired of sending royalties to San Diego (right or wrong). Now, yes, you can run WIPI on BREW. But that defeats WIPI goals 1 and 2. You can also run Windows on Mac, or Java on BREW, but not a lot of people do it. The extra platform layer is a waste, and slows computation speed.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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