Hutchison’s 3 taps BREW

Qualcomm has landed another major European carrier customer for its BREW application environment, announcing today that Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 Group will support BREW-enabled handsets over its multinational all-3G UMTS network.

Qualcomm’s BREW success has been largely in the U.S. and developing markets and almost exclusively among CDMA providers. Verizon Wireless has been its flagship customer, using its BREW to power its Get It Now and V Cast download services. But the San Diego chipmaker has been gradual progress in the last few years in the traditional GSM bastions of Europe, largely by componentizing its platform, separating the BREW client from the back-end distribution platform and from the application runtime environment, which runs the thousands of BREW-based games and applications on the market. It also bought up U.K. content delivery firm Elata and as well as U.K. user-interface developer Trigenix, to create GSM-specific interface for the BREW platform.

The new modular BREW began attracting customers like O2, which began using BREW’s UiOne client on its customizable phones and other carriers worldwide tapped into BREW content delivery platform. But the GSM community in Europe seemed largely reluctant to adopt the BREW application environment, which while having a large developer community, still pales in comparison to the amount of content available worldwide with Java. Qualcomm’s breakthrough, however, came last in November when Telecom Italian Mobile agreed to sell BREW games.

The 3 deal is particularly significant, however, because of the company’s focus on data services. As an all 3G carrier, 3 sells higher-end phones and premium data services in multiple countries in Europe and Asia.