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BREW vs. J2ME: Round 2
THE SKINNY ON NEW TOOLS
A lot has happened since last year's BREW vs. J2ME showdown ("Product Reviews," May 2002). Markets have matured, handsets have come and gone, and a real mobile-game business model has solidified. Both technologies have undergone extensive enhancements in the area of game development APIs. In the case of J2ME, Sun has added their Game API in MIDP 2.0, allowing for native support of sprites and tiles. BREW 2.0 has introduced many new advances, including a similar sprite and tile architecture. This review will compare the two, as well as highlight the major enhancements of each platform.
BREW 2.0
BREW 2.0 has been available for well over a year, and although BREW 2.1 is available, 2.0 handsets are just now rolling out in the U.S.
The biggest enhancement is native support for sprites and tiles. Using the new ISprite interface, it's possible to draw sprites and tile fields with bitmaps restricted to four sizes: 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, and 64x64. BREW 2.0 also allows for the transform of bitmaps, allowing you to flip and rotate images (though only in 90-degree increments on the LG VX6000). The newly-introduced IDIB and IBitmap interfaces replace the old IImage and native bitmaps from BREW 1.0. Through these two interfaces one can convert any format to a device-native bitmap, including compressed PNG and BCI images.
Real-world performance report. The LG VX6000 - featuring a large, 16-bit color display, a built-in camera, gobs of memory, and 1X 3G network speeds -is the first BREW 2.0 handset being released in the U.S. However, the handset has some less-than-impressive performance characteristics. I found this device to be slower than...