Speaking with ComputerWire yesterday, UIQ CEO Johan Sandberg said a number of handsets were in development from a range of licensees, some of which will make use of UIQ 3.0’s new found ability to support both touch screen and alphanumeric keypad inputs.
We have four public licensees and there are more to come. There are some tricky ones that don’t want to talk about what they are doing at the moment, he said.
Sandberg said the first devices using UIQ 3.0, which runs on the newly announced Symbian OS v9, will not appear before the summer. However, when they do, there are likely to be at least some that adopt a more conventional handset form factor than the shrunk down PDA design of existing UIQ devices such as Sony Ericsson’s P800/900/910, Motorola’s A920/925/1000, BenQ’s P30/31 and Arima’s U300.
There are licensees that in parallel are building what I’d call classic as well as soft key-based phones, and licensees that are doing combination devices, said Sandberg. Development delays have been minimal since the platform was announced early last year, he added.
Sandberg said the flexibility of UIQ 3.0 to support multiple different form factors and input methods with a single code base puts the Ronneby, Sweden-based company, a subsidiary of Symbian itself, in a strong position to compete with Nokia’s rival Symbian variants.
In comparison with UIQ 3.0, Nokia’s Series 60, Series 80 and Series 90 variants do not at present offer cross-platform application compatibility. The Finnish giant has outlined plans to merge the touch screen S90 with the keypad-oriented S60 but it is unclear as yet how far such work has progressed.
UIQ 3.0 also offers greater flexibility than S60 at present in terms of manufacturer customization, end-user personalization and operator configuration. The latter is enabled by way of the Operator Configuration Package, a new feature in UIQ 3.0 that allows mobile operators to easily tweak settings, menus and other features of the UI to their own specifications.
Nevertheless, the two main Symbian variants are increasingly converging. Sandberg acknowledged that UIQ and S60 will ultimately offer comparable functionality to end users, mobile operators and handset makers. However, he expects UIQ to benefit both from its UI integration head start and its independence.
I think we are going to be very similar in structure and that there will be other parameters in choosing [such as] the licensing conditions and the architecture. And in the mobile phone industry some manufacturers don’t want to work with the number one. It’s more a question of these parameters than functionality.
Sandberg said UIQ plans to capitalize on these features to attack the potentially lucrative Japanese market.
The Japanese market is very interesting for us at the moment as most [operators] are going for Symbian. I think we’ll see UIQ on [NTT DoCoMo’s] FOMA network for business phones and on other networks.
