BREW: Widgets anyone?

Qualcomm injects widget support into increasingly open BREW platform

Qualcomm is exposing the BREW application platform to the perils and opportunities of the Web applications world. Today it released a new platform called Plaza that opens BREW to the tiny personalized Web applications known as widgets while still supporting the certification and security elements of the BREW environment.

Like widgets on the Web, Plaza widgets hang off a handset’s microbrowser, providing real-time content and interactivity with the Internet from a phone’s home screen. Unlike other BREW applications built in BREW’s native code, Plaza is embracing open Web development standards and is platform agnostic. Essentially any phone with a browser is supported and any standard widget, whether designed for the mobile Internet or the wired one, would theoretically function in Plaza. While Qualcomm will provide a “widget wall” or framework for each operating system or runtime environment -- whether BREW, Java or smartphone OS -- development of the applications themselves will be consistent across all platforms as well as Web.

Qualcomm, however, is performing a balancing act. While it is trying to tap into the creativity and scale of the Web application development community, it is protecting Plaza with the same certification and authentication features that guard its BREW platform. Just as with BREW applications, developers will submit their widgets to Qualcomm for testing and approval, and carriers will select which widgets they choose to offer and if or how much they plan to charge for them. Qualcomm Internet Services President Andrew Gilbert said ultimately the choice will be up to the operators.

“We’ve created on opportunity for operators to control their own destiny,” Gilbert said. They can choose to offer only a limited selection of widgets, or they can allow customers to personalize their phones from the entire Plaza catalog. They can even choose to open the platform entirely, permitting customers to install any application outside of the catalog. Many operators will want to keep some degree of control over what applications make it onto the wall, Gilbert said, not only to prevent against malicious code but also so they can monetize that content. “Our platform ensures that the content is certified and trusted,” he said.

Widgets are no strangers to the mobile world, and they certainly aren’t foreign to BREW. Aricent pioneered mobile widgets with its Celltop application designed for Alltel’s network. Built as a BREW application running constantly on Alltel feature phones, Celltop allows customers to personalize multiple home screens they can page through with a touch of a button. Examples of typical widgets would be a stock ticker page or a sports page that tracked live scores of a favorite team. After receiving accolades for the Alltel deployment, Aricent has taken Celltop global offering it in both BREW and Java implementations.

Celltop, however, is a proprietary application with its own development tools and code, meaning widget developers have to design their apps specifically for the platform. Qualcomm, however, says it will circumvent the SDK, tapping into the larger web development community. Such an approach opens Plaza to enormous pool of developers, but in the end that pool may still be limited by the Plaza certification process.