Another week, another trade show. In AAS podcast 45, Ewan caught up with Johan Sandberg, CEO of UIQ, at the recent CTIA show, to talk about UIQ the impact of a year of two changes of overall ownership.
Read on in the full article.
UIQ from the horse's mouth
I think UIQ have spotted that the real value will be in the UI not the OS. So I can see UIQ4 running on WM and Symbian and on G-system in the future. This would make sense given that SE and Moto are both using more than one OS.
It is only natural that for somebody looking at UIQ (or S60, for that matter) from the outside the idea of a "port" of the interface away from Symbian to another OS pops up. In fact exactly this happened already quite a number of times here on All About Symbian.
But for everybody with a look at UIQ or S60 from the *inside*, i.e. as a programmer, it is quite clear that this won't happen: Both UI's are so much entangled with the Symbian base OS that it is simply not feasible to "transplant" them to another OS.
Speculating about the future course of the Smartphone world certainly is fun, but IMHO such speculation would gain if people took this limitation into account. UIQ and Symbian, as well as S60 and Symbian, are married, they won't divorce.
Of course marketing types have a capacity to call anything "S60" or "UIQ", and maybe the UIQ company will be doing something as crazy as writing an UI for a mobile Linux and label it "UIQ" as well, but this won't matter from a programmer's point of view, and will certainly *not* lead to an immediate high number of "UIQ on Linux" applications because porting of the "UIQ on Symbian" applications will be so easy.
Hell, even porting from UIQ 2.x to UIQ 3, both on Symbian of course, can be a real pain...
@rbrunner
I know things are not that simple 😉 But it does mean that SE, for exmaple, will be running 3 UIs next year: the one used for feature phones, UIQ3/4 and WM! Can't be sensible to continue with so much variety.
Well, as I see it, and probably many other programmers, the high fragmentation of the smartphone OS landscape is a curse, and at least at the beginning each new arrival (like Android now) only makes it worse.
So what can a company like SE do? It can't solve the fragmentation problem all on its own. Betting on all the horses (or at least on several of them) can be a sensible strategy when there is still no hint at all how it will all play out in the long run and how the race will finally end.