Qualcomm made an announcement yesterday that could almost be considered a tease. It named its first BREW customer in Europe, a feat it's been trying to accomplish for years. The thing is, the customer, Nordisk Mobiltelefon, is a CDMA carrier. The Holy Grail Qualcomm's looking for, its first GSM customer, is still elusive.

There's quite a lot of scuttlebutt circulating in Europe though, that Qualcomm is on the verge of a major GSM carrier win. Regardless of whether it's true, it wouldn't be too much of a surprise considering all of the work Qualcomm has put into landing a deal there. In the last year it has acquired Trigenix and Elata, a user interface firm and a content delivery platform provider respectively--both of which cater to the European GSM market. What's more, Qualcomm is quietly working on significant changes to its BREW platform--basically making BREW GSM friendly any way it can.

Who knows if Europe is ready just yet to forget about the religious zeal of the technology wars? And even if the community overall is willing to forget, there are a lot of vendors that will probably try to block the gates to the continent. But if Qualcomm can win a single major GSM carrier, there's likely little to stop BREW from proliferating throughout the world.

Contact me at kfitchard@primediabusiness.com.