Tira Wireless has extended its support for Qualcomm BREW (the Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless). The news comes at the BREW 2006 Conference, being held in Qualcomm's hometown of San Diego, and entails a software solution known as the Tira Jump Product Suite, described by the company as "an end-to-end solution to provide quality assurance services and efficiently adapt and manage BREW mobile applications for wireless operators, ensuring a wide variety of applications for the latest advanced handsets."

BREW competes for wireless application develpers' business with Sun's J2ME environment. Both platforms have certain strengths and weaknesses--BREW is more restrictive and tighly controlled than even Sun's control over J2ME, yet BREW offers the promise of universal wireless development--and to date, the two platforms are both considered to be important to a wireless industry that is re-emerging with the advent of multi-purpose, visually adept mobile phones.

“Tira Wireless is committed to accelerating wireless data revenues by supporting the BREW solution’s ability to drive the discovery and delivery of advanced data services and growing the market for BREW content,” said Randy Busch, senior vice president, product strategy at Tira Wireless. “Our goal is to support their initiatives by ensuring operators with BREW-based services have access to a range of high-quality applications for the latest handsets.”

“Tira’s support for the BREW solution can help to ensure these providers deliver top-quality content to their customers quickly and cost effectively,” said Sachin Deshpande, head of developer relations for Qualcomm Internet Services. “Not only will Tira’s customers be able to adapt and deploy mobile content to BREW devices, it also will gain access to a worldwide market of mobile subscribers.”

The Tira Jump Product Suite enables mobile content developers and publishers to control, adapt, optimize and deploy mobile applications – from simple puzzles to complex multiplayer, multilevel, highly networked games and applications – across more than 500 different handsets, in a variety of languages and for numerous mobile operator networks internationally. Information on more than 150 BREW devices has been added to the Tira Jump Knowledgebase, which currently includes a library of more than 2,500 device idiosyncrasies and workarounds.

BREW 2006 runs May 31 to June 2 this year, and with a tacit nod to a catch phrase of the burgeoning Web 2.0 renaissance, has an overall theme of "Enhancing the Customer Experience" this year.