Say hello to our new masters.
But, we should probably say goodbye to the old ones first. I’ll be writing a small letter to UIQ later today, hoping to get a more clear answer to what sort of business UIQ will run now. I suspect that Rönneby, where the company is based, will have to retain some of it’s employees because of some subsidy issues with the county.. But apart from that, it’s obvious that symbian programmers are facing a bright (if moderately distant) future, either as developers of separate products, or maintainers of the merged Symbian foundation under Nokia ownership.
On the other hand, what will SE do with their existing devices? They’re all capable of running the symbian base that no doubt the new UI will be based on. And with a unified system, even SE will have to see the benefit of streamlining their smartphones, and providing a common base in order to focus on gradually improving application development. The question is, of course, whether anything will be done with the phones at all, instead of nothing.
So we all have many questions about this merge. DoComo will contribute their MOAP-S, Nokia s60, and SE and Moto will provide UIQ - but until something is made from it - which seems to be several years down the line - what are the plans?
If you have a question or two you want to send along with my condolences to UIQ, have a question for SE - or just want to speculate about the foundation, or the motivations of the various partners for joining while the news sinks in.. the thread is yours.
Update:
All right, that’s it. No more stupid comments about what this merge means from now on. I mean it.
First of all: we don’t know what the merge means yet. There are several very disturbing prospects about the merge, of course - such as Nokia’s influence over the entire thing, and whether every mobile phone in the universe is going to run an s60 thousand click torture “plus” version from 2010 and until the end of time. Or that somehow now all other mobile phones will disappear in a magic flash. It’s also possible that the only option the Symbian foundation will offer about open development - is that those programs are written for s60, and have no access to any of the apis, just like on the iPhone. The Nokia board could also be laughing maniacally while envisioning all the people who will be forced to weari out their thumb trying to get anything to work, while imagining that they have once and for all destroyed “the smartphone” concept, specially any contenders based on other Open specifications that exist outside Symbian which absolutely didn’t matter at all in any of this (absolutely not). We just don’t know yet.
But the long and the short of it is that there will be a unified symbian stack on basic OS level implementations - something that nokia sorely needed after having tried to implement almost everything in s60 dependent libraries, and even included specific phone- dependent implementations of some general libraries - which is a remarkable waste of both time and money. And now some efforts like that might actually end up being contributed back to the symbian foundation - and they might be designed to allow reuse from the beginning (unheard of so far) - and we will all benefit from that.
Second: the UI on the top is not - I repeat - NOT - the same as the OS. So while I’m sure that some form of specific UI will be provided with the Symbian foundation, there’s nothing that suggests anything from Qt to an OpenGL ES explorer framework, or an Adobe Flash- framework with java- ports driving a proprietary tamaguchi- addon - won’t work on top of that system. Neither does this mean we won’t have a billion attempts by phone- manufacturers to provide their very own SYMBIAN phone with two buttons on the animated home- screen to choose from, and so on. And no doubt all the firms who invest in the iPhone now will also fall over themselves to pay thousands of dollars to see a music video sprouting an animated background image with nice colours.
Nothing will change about any of that - so don’t worry about a thing. Almost nothing really changed today. (Except that SE will throw away all the symbian competence they have, and go bankrupt. Allright, maybe not bankrupt).
But who cares about that, anyway? When everyone can develop for Symbian for free (in two years time, very probably)? And most likely be able to deploy their programs on several - if not all of the phones, depdending on how much work you’re willing to put into it? Or you could choose just the phones with the multiplatform framework you like best, from your favourite supplier?
That would work, yeah?
And for the last time - the problem with the smartphone business is NOT that the industry giants are too hung up on Operating Systems, and too eager about making the internal mechanics on the phones run smoothly. That was never, ever, the problem with the mobile industry. The problem was that every single company was always more interested in developing animated buttons and useless sounds, or ridiculous pay a truckload per kilobyte services like MMS. Because people just don’t want any more advanced stuff like that, you see! Billions of Opera 4 downloads? Who cares! Complaints about too hight flat data- rates? Put in a special for more SMS messages, and that will net you more subscribers! People who see an IM client implemented through Qt and say: “why can’t I have something like that on my phone”? Call them idiots and insist MMS is the future! Do you wonder why you can’t copy and paste out text, like on a real computer? Come up with an excuse for how the phone is physically incapable of storing /those/ kinds of data, while advertisements for the phone- maker inexplicably can be displayed at any time!
That’s the problem. And now - for some fantastic reason having to do with an utterly unexpected decline in the rate of growth for the mobile industry - i.e., it clearly failed to stay on course for reaching infinity by 2012 - something new will have to be tried.
And I don’t really see the problem with that. Besides - we’ll see how it works out when the time comes.
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SEMC, Moto and Nokia just said in their webcast that the new unified platform is ready H1/2010. Thus the devices based on it will be shipping starting H2/2010.
Meanwhile all will continue launching the phones under development now. And most likely these will continue to be in shops (or at least in use) parallel with the new ones.
However…my main concern is this is a big blow to UIQ software development, unless SE/UIQ comes and says something to tranqualize people
and says something to tranqualize people
Uh, tranquilize is an interesting choice of words. I get a picture in my mind about everybody around UIQ slowly, slowly falling into a deeper and deeper coma… Sleep, UIQ, sleep
lol. But it’s an interesting problem. Two years is a long time. And more than enough to deploy several programs.. and new phones. That might easily be useful for long after the new OS base turns up. At the same time, just opening up the Symbian libraries like this - wouldn’t that make any Symbian device interesting for deployment of software?
Yes, two years is a long time, and maybe just about the longest time that you can hope that something is kept stable in the world of mobiles with their mind-boggling speed of change.
Maybe everything has something positive: If I publish for UIQ now, I have a market for 2 years at least where I am pretty safe from nasty surprises like an UIQ 4 that makes my programs incompatible yet again. And I might even have good chances in this market because a lot of companies quit the UIQ race, wait for 2010, and leave the field to me.
But this all might only be interesting if I have a product that is reasonably near release already. Starting something bigger from scratch for UIQ now could be somewhat problematic, calendar-wise…
What they could do, if they were smart, would be retro-fitting UIQ 3.3 stuff to all existing UIQ3 devices, and launch some more with the exact same plaform meanwhile…this would make it really stable until the transition
Tuukka (TTT), thanks for your input…i am glad you will keep developing @web, the existing UIQ userbase will appreciate it alot!!
yeah its sounding like uiq’s on the way out for good, which is unfortunate.. especially since uiq v3.3 is sitting there and none of us can have it..
i truly hope they retro fit our current se smartphone’s with this software before it disappears..
dear ares i dont think Se will produce any more phones with uiq.just think a minute.why they canceled paris and beibei?why they didn’t upgrade the hardware?why did they go to WM?
because they see no more money in uiq.they just sold their share.
i see no future for uiq in these 2 years.just imagine that it was uiq and now its not!
although i dont know about future and their plans for new symbian platform.
Dear paker, decision to go for a WM device was made way before this was decided,more than one year ago, and the objective was to get some market share on the US…
i didnt want to tell they knew the foundation one year ago.i tell why didnt they put these money in uiq to make it better and many more questions.i hope they give a good answer to uiqblog e-mail that contains my questions too.
i dont think Se will produce any more phones with uiq
This will be interesting to watch. I personally see no problem for SE to put out a few more UIQ phones over the course of the next two years. Some of them are probably already in the pipeline and half finished or even nearer to release than that, so why not finish and bring them to market. If the alternative - starting from scratch with WM phones for the worldwide market - is more costly and takes to much time, not a good idea to go down that route.
But of course it could go very different ways. If SE sees no future in Symbian - with whatever interface on top - for itself over the long run, maybe best to abandon it as fast as possible.
Hallo
think positive and lets wait and see, what will happen !
It is a good approach to keep Google Android out of the market !
Gerhard
IT’s funny to see how you all think SE-UIQ. Yes, SE pulled their UIQ phones out, and now seem to get rid of UIQ all together, but no one mentioned Motorola: we haven’t heard any bad (UIQ relaled) news from them in a while. Maybe there is something happening on that side. they also have 2 years to release more UIQ phones. Just a thought.
@werty: Motorola indicated yesterday
«For Motorola, it will accelerate our ability deliver more Symbian based exciting innovative Motorola devices, continuing with UIQ through 2009.»
http://www.symbianfoundation.org/files/AnnouncementPresentation.pdf
Its natural to associate more SE with UIQ…
If SE is abandoning UIQ, why should i buy SE UIQ phone from now on? With UIQ layoff, it’s sure to affect UIQ software update on these phones.
Its SE that supports SE UIQ phones, not UIQ…so there should be no problems there
The way I read the news I don’t see enough evidence UIQ/Nokia interfaces will merge or disappear, I only see evidence of a more generic Symbian OS Platform.
If I were you I wouldn’t bother with the news until something really comes up, which may take a lot of time. By 2010 we will have a different mobile reality, and we will access the success of the initiative.
Right. Who would care about UIQ or s60 in two years? It’s just silly. Besides - we still don’t have any word from SE about fixing the implementation faults - nothing’s changed there either.
The reason we haven’t heard anything new from Motorola about UIQ phones is that Motorola don’t know where they’re going as a company and don’t know which of their future handsets will ever see the light of day!
As mentioned elsewhere, it now seems likely that the Moto Z12 (Skarven) has been cancelled in it’s current form and will instead be turned into a different phone (still UIQ based probably) - however that means that rather than the expected ship date of October - December this year, we’re probably looking at June - July next year, which may well be too late for Motorola as a whole!
Jun 25th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
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