Rafe’s editorial explains a lot
Our good friend at AAS, Rafe Blandford, wrote a long editorial piece where he explains his thoughts and concerns about the newly announced Symbian Foundation. After reading it, I fully agreed that the move is inevitable and I was saddened to read the following sentences “For Sony Ericsson, Motorola and UIQ Technology, it is the end of an era. UIQ as a software platform will effectively disappear. UIQ’s fans will be sad to see it go; it remains, arguably, the most technically elegant of the Symbian software platforms.” It’s really sad, but true… Get a cup of coffee and read the piece, it’s interesting…
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Some interesting points:
“he new platform will use elements of both MOAP-S and UIQ, but the core will be based on S60. Effectively the new platform will use an evolved version of S60 - both UIQ and MOAP-S can now be considered dead ends”
“and Sony Ericsson was unable to fully realise the potential of UIQ”
“Nokia is already anticipating this with Ovi as are Microsoft and Google with their respective service suites. Other handset manufacturers will be following in their footsteps.”
and all of “Implications for players in the Symbian Foundation”.
he major changes are the re-unification of the Symbian UIs (or the victory of S60)!!!
then if we want to understand one thing from these article,it is: nokia is going to be ONE!
i just can say one thing:
shame on se.
I don’t mean any disrespect to anyone with this. But.. the entire “UIQ is dead because Nokia is taking over” is a bunch of crap. There’s nothing stopping SE from using UIQ3 on top of Symbian stack for long after they’ve started using resources from the Symbian foundation. Neither is there anything stopping SE from fixing their non- UIQ programs on all new symbian phones until the end of time.
Besides, what Nokia will do with their phones is interesting to Nokia - and of course they will offer s60 backward compatibility (or at least claim they will, until there’s no interest in these apps anymore).
But what will kill UIQ tech is that SE, as the primary owner, has whimsically found an excuse to disband their Symbian smartphone department for the time being, just like they’ve apparently been pining to do for several years (while sabotaging any effort to make it take off by horrible coding and incredible talent at fracturing everything on the phone they’ve touched - from the key- lock to the media- player). So unless someone buys up SE’s shares and use UIQ for something, then UIQ doesn’t have any reason for existing. I.e, they won’t get any new commissions, so there’s no reason for the expansion they imagined would happen recently.
But this has nothing to do with Nokia, and everything to do with SE.
Well, until now much is really speculation only, and Nipsen may be right, but I do regard UIQ as dead in around 2 years.
Yes, there would be no technical reason stopping SE to continue to put UIQ on top of the Symbian foundation stuff. But as I see it, as part of the whole deal, Nokia could get SE to agree to *not* do this. I think the members of the Symbian ecosystem reached a consensus that the whole UI fragmentation stuff went on long enough, is damaging Symbian in the long run and has. to. stop.
And I agree wholeheartedly: No OS really needs more than one UI on top.
S60 versus UIQ reminds me of the schism between KDE and Gnome over at Linux which is a rather controversial thing and absorbs tons of resources of all kinds for nothing more than maybe a little more innovation because of the competition which you could also get by other means, sans all the wasting of resources. I see Microsoft really enjoying this Linux UI infighting.
Or, from the hardware department, HD DVD versus Blu-ray. Two times nearly the same thing, essentially pointless ecxept for the company that wins the format war in the end and gets more royalties than would have been possible by a consensus format right from the start.
Nokia probably could do that, and get SE to drop UIQ. But I think SE hasn’t had much faith in UIQ for a long time, and that their decisions not to run on the platform is based on other considerations. That involves how UIQ isn’t as viable for selling handsets.
So I don’t see this as infighting between UIQ and s60, really. What they appear to be doing is competing about choosing the most economically useful platform, as rated by the larger players and telecoms. And that means that Symbian with s60+ will probably be a package geared towards the requirements of the large telecoms, while it’s possible that some outsider or other will go a route towards trying to sell the device on third party development and device platform consistency (instead of single device dependent implementations, like I’m sure SE will choose as much as possible, to maintain “renewal”).
Of course. If they were smart, they would use this opportunity to make the UI they choose keep the platform consistency in UIQ, and the scalability of UIQ from different resolutions and so on. While keeping graphics apis, syntax and any useful conventions from s60, and transfer those to the Symbian base.
But, you know - there’s nothing stopping anyone from compiling programs for Symbian 9 with UIQ libraries linked into the program in the future, if those libraries become available. Wrapped in some other framework, I mean.
I still think that this isn’t as big as some make it out to be, though. We always knew that the handset business was like this, closed like a knot. And now we’ll be able to get an orchestra view of how they’re going to pull off another promising project with huge potential. And see what will be done with it.
I.e., if they’ll go the iPhone route - with limited sdk and a sandbox for 3rd party development to maintain platform security once the OS hits a device - and then spend all effort on making a pay per buttonpress program that’s linked to network dependent services. Or if they end up making good on the promise of the platform, and make a developer- friendly framework that ensures easy and consistent deployment on the platform without device dependent (or short term) platform conventions.
I know which device I will buy of those two - if any one at all. (In the meantime I think I’ll be very happy with my p1, to be honest
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Jul 1st, 2008 at 11:17 pm
[...] I end this article by stating the obvious: all this enthusiasm and praise about things that are a bit “shady” could instead be focused on SE if only they did the right thing: provide firmware updates that actually added value to their devices like their competitor do. Instead, they prefer to “kill” UIQ3. [...]