Guest post by Amidst the hubbub over MacWorld 2009, El Reg quietly noted that the company UIQ, the joint venture of Sony Ericsson and Motorola and eponymous creator of the UIQ interface layer for the Symbian smartphone OS, has filed for bankruptcy in the Swedish courts.
This is a not unexpected turn of events seeing as the staff members were put on notice in November. Numerous factors conspired to create this turn of events: First, Nokia bought out all shares of Symbian and created the open-source Symbian Foundation, which aims to incorporate the best bits of Nokia’s S60 platform, UIQ and the Japanese MOAP. As the second article notes, “realistically, that means co-opting interesting features into the next version of S60 – leaving MOAP and UIQ developers in the cold.”.
Meanwhile, Motorola completely backed out of its 11-phone commitment for 2009, and with Sony Ericsson (historically UIQ’s primary benefactor) turning to Windows Mobile for its latest flagship smartphone the X1, the writing was on the wall. In addition to the news coverage, El Reg provides an in-depth look at UIQ’s history, what made UIQ so special and what went wrong.
On a personal note, I am a very happy UIQ3 user (on a Sony Ericsson P1i), and I plan to cherish this obsolete ultimate culmination of UIQ development for some time to come. Here’s to the developers who made it happen; hopefully they find new employment soon.
Sony Ericsson is going Windows?
I guess I’ll be looking for a different smartphone vendor when my P990 dies.
It seems that they are, but they’re also doing other things, so there might be android phones coming out of SE as well:
http://androidcommunity.com/sony-ericsson-android-by-summer-2009-20…
As so you are using a P990? I was in on making that device:) But don’t blame me for any of the bugs
You should be able to pick up a pretty cheap second hand P1i by now, which is a far better device than the P990 ever was, while you wait for the dust to settle. And if you don’t live in Sweden you could always pick up an iPhone and give it a go.
From a developer point of view this was to be expected.
Symbian based OS, UIQ and S60 are a pain to program for. The C++ dialect they required developers to use is so early 90s that your people being paid good money will endure programming for them.
Now comparing with the choice companies are having with more sane OS, it is understandable that something like this would happen.
This is also a reason why Nokia decided to go open source with S60. As a way to attract developers to their platform.
Something is about to surface from the labs…
hmm… yes, bankruptcy!
I’m a happy P1i owner and actually hoped to use it for a long time. That is, until the P2i or whatever they would call it, was released.
So, is this another platform Microsoft won? Is there any viable Symbian interface in the pipeline? I tried S60, but didnt really like it that much.
Perhaps I should buy myself a spare P1i on eBay.