Android and Brew are both operating systems for mobile phones. Android is a mobile operating system owned by Google and has become a household name today because of its widespread use in smartphones. Brew, an acronym for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless, is also an OS that is used for low end segment mobile phones. It is an application development program developed by Qualcomm, which is renowned for making processors for mobile phones. While Android is tremendously popular and a rage among the users, Brew is not even known even if it is used by a mobile phone owner. Android was released after Brew so it incorporated all the good features of Brew and introduced many new features.
The biggest difference between Android and Brew lies in their usage. While Android is mainly used in high end phones such as smartphones and tablet PC, Brew is confined to lower segment mobile phones only. While Android, despite being only an operating system has become almost a status symbol and people are proud to own a mobile running on Android OS, Brew phones are hard to spot and there is no mention of the name on the phones using it as an OS. In fact phone manufacturers display the logo of android on their phones to tell customers that they are using the latest technology.
One of the best features of Brew is the ability to write extensions such as plugin components of applications and also to introduce new features into the application. In Android, this feature is non existent but anybody can write such applications through third party developers. In Android, this feature is implemented in the form of AIDL.
Another difference between Brew and Android is that Brew supports only CDMA mobiles whereas Android supports GSM and UMTS technologies. However, being open source, it is expected to support CDMA in future.
Despite being older than Android, Brew has relatively fewer applications (18000 in comparison to some 150000 of Android). While some of the apps from Android are free, Brew apps can only be purchased.
In short, it can be said that Android is much more than just being a mobile OS as it is being used for notebooks, e-readers and even a TV has been launched running on Android platform while Brew remains just an ecosystem for basic mobile phones.
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Summary While both Brew and Android are OS for mobile phones, Android is much more advanced and is also used for Table PC and smart phones, while Brew is mainly used in low end mobiles. Android is owned by Google, while Brew is made by Qualcomm, manufacturers of processors for smartphones. Android has become a rage whereas Brew is relatively unknown entity. |