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Today's anouncements of Nokia buying Symbian Ltd; the foundation of the Symbian Foundation; Nokia, SonyEricsson, Motorola & NTT DOCOMO donating their existing technologies to the foundation; and the intention to create a single, unified OS / UI platform, which will then be open sourced and free to use, mark a significant change in the Symbian, S60 and UIQ ecosystems. What will this mean to for the future of UIQ and UIQ based phones, such as Motorola's Zine range?
Before looking into the future of UIQ as a platform, let's look at recent developments from Motorola and SonyEricsson regarding their UIQ handset range. While we have concentrated on Motorola's handsets on this site, SonyEricsson have obviously been developing new handsets as well... in recent days it became clear that SonyEricsson have now cancelled their upcoming Paris (P5 and Beibei G905) handsets. This is obviously a major move for SE, and while it's true that both Paris and Beibei were being built on a now-outdated hardware platform, the cancellation of any phone product can not be taken as a good thing.
Motorola on the other hand have not cancelled any of their future products (as far as we know), but they do seem to like delaying and delaying their handsets. Z10 was due in October last year, Z12 (Skarven) was due for 3GSM this year, and about now we should have been hearing about Texel.However, Z10 was fnally released in April this year and Z12 and Texel are still to be formally anounced. (rumour has it that due to the delays Z12 won't ship in it's current format)
Now, with today's anouncements of the Symbian Foundation, UIQ shedding 200 staff, and the commitment from the new Symbian Foundation & Nokia to roll S60 into the upcoming unified OS / UI, it's a fair bet to think that UIQs days are numbered. What this is likely to mean is that some existing UIQ technology (and please let that be Agenda and Messaging) will be migrated into the existing and upcoming S60 / S60 Touch UIs.
In other words, we're unlikely to see UIQ based handsets much beyond the next year, as the Foundation timescale for their open source unified OS / UI is 18 months.
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