J2ME for BREW Phones
This is an interesting bit of news. A company called Esmertec has come up with a MIDP 2.0 JVM for the BREW platform which you can distribute to any BREW 2.0 phone. My understanding was that BREW 2.0 was going to have this capability built-in - but now I'm wondering whether this is actually the solution that Qualcomm was talking about. It's an intersting model - the JVM as a runtime that you can redistribute with your app.
Here in the Bay Area, almost every single mobile-dev job I've seen has requested both J2ME and BREW. That seems like a pretty wacky pair because developing in low-level C++ for the BREW "OS" and developing within the sandboxed J2ME are completely different skill sets, but it shows you that many mobile companies consider BREW an important platform to target. I would assume that it's 100% to do with the penetration of CDMA devices that countries in Asia have, rather than anything to do with the U.S., but this could change. GSM and CDMA both have about 50% of the market share in the U.S. and just as newer color GPRS phones are just hitting the market, I'm sure that newer BREW-enabled CDMA2000 1x phones are also starting to hit.
And since the BREW Distribution System makes it both easy and lucrative for carriers to offer BREW apps to their clients, I'm sure that we'll start seeing more and more demand for BREW games. Being in the Java/GSM world, I haven't even *seen* a BREW device live yet. But there's definitely a demand there. The cool thing about this jBed app from Esmertec is that finally J2ME developers can get into the BDS system as well.
-Russ