Sprint eyeing BREW

After years of striking its own mobile data course, Sprint is taking another look at Qualcomm’ BREW. The carrier said today it has incorporated BREW’s UiOne user interface into one of its phones, utilizing it to create “themed” decks users can tailor to their liking, and has plans to launch the UI on other handsets.

A Sprint spokesman confirmed today that Sprint is using UiOne on the Sanyo MM-7500 Power Vision phone, allowing users to customize their screens and interfaces with multiple interactive themes such as baseball and other affinities. Qualcomm also announced yesterday that Sprint would be one of the key presenters at its BREW conference in June, leading a discussion on how to use UiOne as theme engine.

But the Sprint spokesman said that adopting the BREW UI does not change Sprint’s overall content strategy. He said Sprint’s core application engine is still Java, and the company is dedicated to using the Java platform for all of its non-smartphone applications. Unlike Verizon Wireless, which itself doesn’t use UiOne, Sprint is not using the BREW delivery platform or content catalog.

Qualcomm revamped the BREW platform last year, creating a modular system that divided BREW into three components: UiOne, based on the user interface technology acquired from Trigenix, a content delivery and management platform and a library of content. The new flexibility in the platform gave carriers the option to taking part or all of the solution, allowing them to tailor the individual elements to their own content strategies. KDDI in Japan for instance uses the BREW delivery and management engine, but maintains its own content portfolio of Java applications in house and doesn’t use the BREW UI. O2, BREW’s first GSM customer, is trailing UiOne on one of its handsets as part of its efforts to create a unified customer experience across all of its handsets, but it’s using no other BREW components.

Sprint has always been cautious about overarching solutions that tie it into one vendor. It’s adoption of UiOne shows that Qualcomm’s new modular approach to BREW is working, said Bob Briggs, senior vice president for Qualcomm Internet Services. While some carriers may choose to follow Sprint’s lead and use UiOne to create a specialized service for a portion of its handsets, he said, others may choose to user UiOne as way to create a consistent user interface across all of its handsets.