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UIQ is now a 50/50 joint venture between Sony Ericsson and Motorola

By: , IntoMobile
Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 9:35 AM

oppennes_uiq.jpg

UIQ, Sony Ericsson and Motorola held a press conference today, which I had the pleasure of attending, where they announced their new strategy to become an open platform. What exactly does that mean? Anyone can own a piece of UIQ, in fact as of today Sony Ericsson no longer owns 100% of UIQ, but instead they split the company 50/50 with Motorola. Why would they want to do this? To make other companies interested in building devices on top of UIQ less frightened of the fact that the future of the operating system they’re using sits in the hands of one company.

There have been relatively few non Nokia products based on S60, why would a manufacture want to push an operating system that is so heavily influenced by the hand of a major competitor? UIQ on the other hand, after being purchased by Sony Ericsson in February of this year, has been implemented on a Motorola device called the Z8 with more hardware being expected in 2008.

Among the tidbits of information announced at the show was the fact that UIQ is now going to gain a picture and movie editor:

videoandphoto.jpg

As well as the user interface being extremely customizable. The text is blurry, but in the first picture it says “draw your symbol to unlock,” and in this case it is a heart. The second third and forth images are all showing the same thing, someones contact information, but it shows how versatile and robust the future presentation foundation of UIQ will be in letting phone manufactures present data to the user:

heatunlockcontact.jpg

 

This is a brilliant move and is sure to put some pressure on Nokia to open up their S60 platform as well. I’m hoping Samsung joins this new UIQ foundation because when you have three of the top four companies in mobile phones working together then you are undoubtedly going to plant the seeds for a beautiful flower to blossom that could not have otherwise grown from one entity.

Let innovation cross breed, in the end we win.

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About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

  • Denis Baranov

    Stefan, there are three things in the screen shots of contact lists suggesting that SE and/or Motorola are working on a phone worthy of being called “iPhone rival”:
    1) lack of any soft buttons
    2) full alphabet under the contact pictures
    3) huge “Call” button in the individual contact view with several other options available

    Also, notice that the screen shots of photo and video editors are from a different firmware than those of contact lists since the status bars in the upper section of the screen are different.

  • Will Park

    We’ll have to wait and see if this Sony Ericsson Maria does indeed materialize with this new UI :wink:

    Good eye, Denis :shock: