Brew phones to talk to Xboxes

DISCUSSIONS ARE underway to enable mobile phones running Qualcomm's Brew environment to interact with Microsoft's Xbox consoles connecting over broadband.

The news leaked out at the launch of Qualcomm's first major European customer for Brew - Italy's TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile). TIM said that an Xbox to Brew phone capability should be operational by Q4 2007.

TIM might be a little optimistic revealed Qualcomm Europe's business development director, Anthony Sheehan. Initially players from both platforms will be able register their respective high scores on the same web site.

It might take a little longer for a true interactive multiplayer game to take place where one player is on a 3G phone and the other on a broadband Xbox.

Nonetheless he confirmed Qualcomm is talking to the Beast of Redmond about just such a possibility.

Sheehan also dispelled the popular notion that Brew can only be run on handsets based around Qualcomm's own handset chips. On Verizon in the USA, Brew is being run on certain Nokia handsets.

Obviously other European operators would embrace Brew wholeheartedly if it could run on all leading handsets. Today's launch of Brew by TIM involved only two handsets.

The N5050 from Onda and the Z630 from Samsung were the two involved. The INQ has captured an N5050 and hopefully should soon be able to report which Chinese manufacturer supplies Onda with its handsets.

Sheehan hinted that Nokia would only probably consider offering Brew on its handsets in Europe once it was convinced that new versions of Brew would appear simultaneously for Qualcomm and non-Qualcomm based handsets.

At the launch, the 3D games which Brew facilitates to run on 3G phones definitely looked like the Dog's Bees. µ