Make Location Aware Apps Part of the Grind with BREW

hile Qualcomm BREW has had support for location-based services (LBS) applications since its inception, only recently have CDMA carriers begun to roll out the back-end support these applications need. Consequently, the BREW LBS interface may be one of the least-used and least-understood interfaces available to handset developers. Yet, in the coming year these may be the most in-demand as application developers race to bring location-awareness to their applications.

Introducing the IPosDet Interface
Since its inception, Qualcomm BREW has provided some form or another of LBS support. Beginning in BREW 1.1, Qualcomm added the IPosDet interface, a versatile asynchronous interface for obtaining both traditional latitude/longitude and cellular base station location information (most applications will use the traditional latitude/longitude based positioning, because this is the easiest way to interface with back-end geocoded databases). This interface provides direct access to the handset's assisted Global Positioning System (GPS) facility gpsOne, in which the handset monitors both the cellular network and GPS satellite signals and offloads expensive processing to location servers on the network, permitting location fixes with as little as one cell site and one GPS satellite's worth of data.