The UIQ Evangelist

After waiting for more than a month, I now have in my hands the answers to 10 selected questions that were posted by readers of this blog. I must say that I really appreciate the time given by person who handled this from UIQ Technology, he is none other than Sebastien Peirone, Developer Communications Manager, UIQ Technology who have taken the effort to assist us UIQBlog readers in answering these 10 questions regarding our choice, UIQ. Read the full interview after the break. The answers are in Italic.

After some editing and proofreading, here are the 10 questions for UIQ Technology :

Before I answer your questions, there is one thing that you should keep in mind: despite having over 400 employees, UIQ Technology is relatively small, compared to other companies in this industry. Knowing this helps one understand what we do and how we do it: we can’t do everything, so we must prioritize. And what has the highest priority is the success of our customers, the phone manufacturers. And to achieve that, most of the company’s efforts are focused on delivering on time with the highest quality possible.

1 . Why is documentation for 3rd party developers so limited?
I wouldn’t call it limited: the number of articles, white papers or examples might not compare to what is found in other platforms, but we focus on the quality and relevance of each of them. If you can’t find an answer in the documentation available, you can always use the discussion forums which often provides you with the right answer, and we have received a lot of positive feedback about it from fellow developers.
That being said, we are constantly growing and improving the UIQ documentation in term of content, and at the moment we are also working on making the SDK documentation more complete, and at the same time easier to access and use.
or instance, just a few weeks ago we have put the up-coming “UIQ 3: The Complete Guide” book on-line and this is an initiative aimed at supporting the developers with first grade documentation.
Furthermore, we are always open to publish or even sponsor any documentation that third parties provide us with.

2. If it is possible to backport UIQ versions (Say for example, a P990 is using UIQ 3 but is it possible to put UIQ 2.1 into it?) is the decision up to the phone manufacturer alone? Is it even possible to backport UIQ?
No, it’s not possible to upgrade or downgrade the OS on a Symbian phone, and since UIQ is tightly dependent on the Symbian version it runs on , you can’t swap UI either.

3 . Why UIQ (and it’s licensees Sony Ericsson & Motorola) did such a bad job in terms of public relations, compared with the competitors (e.g. Nokia S60, Microsoft WM & Apple iPhone)?
As you can understand, we can’t speak for our licensees, so you will have to ask them directly if you have some questions.
As for UIQ Technology, I believe that we do a rather good job, trying to be present at relevant events and making ourselves available and open for questions and discussions.

4 . Do you think the strategy of hiding UIQ under manufacturer’s brand is better than what Nokia is doing with it’s S60 platform?
We are not hiding, nor are we pushing the UIQ brand to the forefront. UIQ Technology is an independent software provider and our priority is to make our customers - the phone manufacturers - as successful as possible, and as for now and for some more time to come, we don’t think that having end users knowing the name of the UI on their phone is a major factor to this success. For most users the name of the UI or even the OS in the phone is irrelevant. Of course, most of the readers in this blog think otherwise! But I really don’t think they represent the majority of users. However, this doesn’t mean that we neglect or disregard the end users, we simply don’t put as much focus and resources in branding as others do. Personally, I think we can increase the end user awareness by directly providing quality content to their UIQ phones to help them personalize them, and I will push for this, as a first step of a widely public UIQ brand.

5 . What sort of strategies does UIQ Technology focus on it’s Public Relation? How will these strategies change, now that UIQ is owned by 2 companies?
As mentioned earlier, our strategy is to inform the public when and where it’s possible and relevant to do so, and this will not change, no matter who and how many the owners of UIQ Technology are. We will stay open and available to any questions but we will never spread information that we are not supposed to, like coming phones and strategic plans for the platform. What has changed in the past months, and that, I think, you will see happening more and more, is that Motorola, Sony Ericsson and UIQ will communicate together, unified, to the press, developers, users, etc. That is one of the advantage of being a common, independent platform.

6 . How does UIQ receive feedback or suggestions on it’s design-choices. For example on the the native programs, the ways they are integrated, or interact with each other, etc.
The most common channel is to send your suggestions to info@uiq.com. This email address is checked daily - including by myself - and we are usually quite fast to answer. I understand and fully support the ideas for gathering the feedback from users and developers would be most welcomed. We are currently working on that and you will see improvements in this area during the coming year.

7 . What sort of influence does UIQ have over how the platform is used on the phones its owners will manufacture? In terms of hardware- profiles: hardware layouts, modems, board bandwidth, storage, ram size, processor choice, cache stack sizes, etc. Is it a two way street between UIQ and the phone manufacturer? Are there other criteria than generally available hardware involved, or just general concern for economic use of resources on mobile units, that counts more when limitations of different kinds are chosen for the UIQ releases?
We don’t have much influence, really. In that regard, UIQ is “just” the provider of one of the many components that make part of a phone. Of course, using UIQ imposes some minimum requirements on the hardware, to ensure good performance, but those are minimal and easily met. When it comes to form factor, UIQ is the most flexible UI platform on the market, and can be used with a wide range of designs. So UIQ doesn’t influence the phones on how it should be built in or on the way it should be used. In that regard, UIQ is more an enabler than a constraint, and this has already been proven by the very different types of phones launched with UIQ.
You have to know that the licensees of UIQ can change or add virtually anything in the platform without involving us and, as always, if you can do everything and anything, you can do good and bad things, and we are continuously working together with our licensees to make sure that they stay on the good track, but there is only so much that we can say or do about it.

8 . What sort of views does UIQ have on incorporating garbage- collection routines, enabling c++ type exceptions, demand paging, and so on, into the design for future UIQ releases? Will this change how the platform looks and feels in terms of stability and speed? Will the annoying garbled screens between transitions, and when loading programs, ever disappear?
Those features you are mentioning are more part of the Operating System (Symbian OS) than the user interface (UIQ). Demand paging is a very good example on how things work: this feature is available starting on Symbian 9.3 and onward only. UIQ almost never changes/adds/removes anything from Symbian OS, so none of the current UIQ based phones (using Symbian OS 9.1 or 9.2) are using demand paging. Future versions of UIQ, using later versions of the OS, will automatically have that feature integrated. Garbage collection and C++ type exception follow the same principle: it will be available on UIQ when a UIQ version will be based on a Symbian OS version supporting it.

9 . How high a priority is it for UIQ to make it easy for developers to create replacements for the “front- ends”, the today screens, etc.? & Why isn’t there a public api for recording phone calls?
The home-screen is one of the areas that UIQ leaves to its licenses to customize; it’s an important part of differentiation from one to the other. If you compare the Z10 with a P1 for example, you can see that each manufacturers are playing this card fully and each one is doing something different. Giving third parties the possibility to replace it is therefore not something you will see anytime soon. It is not completely closed however, and you can find several good applications that extend it, but none fully replace it.
Regarding recording phone calls, the telephony is not provided by UIQ but by its licensees, so any questions relating to this should be directed to the phone manufacturers.

10. When UIQ will support Flash support (Youtube viewing etc). Is it only for future devices? Shouldn’t that be a built-in feature in a modern device?
We can’t answer this question at the moment. Sometimes, you know, the bulk of work tends to be more on the legal side than the engineering side. That’s the modern world.

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