I went to a joint UIQ/Motorola/Sony Ericsson pre-Smartphone Show developer event yesterday evening on the day when it was announced that Motorola would take a 50% stake in UIQ.

I talked to lots of people within and outside the three organisations to try to get a feel for what would be likely to change now that Motorola is more involved. I didn’t get any answers. I got the feeling that the move was more political rather than practical. UIQ would now been seen to be more independent and not under the control of just Sony Ericsson. This, in turn, might encourage new licensees to further share in UIQ Technology and use the UIQ platform.

Meanwhile, the lack of announcement of practical changes has caused a wild prediction…

"The announcement could also mean that Motorola hopes to influence the development of UIQ such that the software could become compatible with other operating systems like Linux, he (Gerry Purdy, chief analyst at Frost and Sullivan) said."

I can see how Motorola’s heavy (and lengthy) involvement in mobile Linux might make analysts think like this. However, UIQ is so deeply tied to the Symbian OS that working under Linux really isn’t viable and isn’t going to happen.

Related Articles:

• Motorola Z8 Testing
• UIQ Independence
• UIQ Getting Started - Releasing an Application
• UIQ Getting Started - Working with Code
• Sony Ericsson to Acquire UIQ
• 3GSM UIQ Presentations
• UIQ 3.0 Development
• UIQ 3.0 SDK

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under Symbian, UIQ, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.