Why UIQ failed to meet the expectations?
Guest writer Vishwanath wrote an interesting piece chronologically tells us how UIQ as a piece of technology, being left behind and as users who felt saddened by it’s uncertainty in the future (errr… actually, it’s dead)… or it’s untimely death, he illustrates to us why UIQ failed. A good read and only takes you 5 minutes or so… I welcome all comments and discussion about this.
UIQ as a platform is flexible and sophisticated. It was regarded as a platform with a lot of potential in it. But it failed to deliver results. Behind the failure there are a lot of things which in one or the other way affected the development of UIQ as the best platform.
With development of new UIQ 3.0 and its introduction into the flagship phones like p990, W950 the future of UIQ is changed.
After p900 and p910 became huge hit as a business phones, a lot was expected on p990 which is based on new UIQ 3.0. Because of it below par performance and instability, it failed to become a true business class phone.
The P990 next to its predecessor
The reason is, when p990 was released it was too unstable and the basic functions were not working properly. The ram built into the p990 was very low (i.e. 64mb) which was not sufficient for a business phone which was believed to be having niche functions like multitasking and multimedia capabilities. When complex apps are launched much of the free ram is occupied by it thus masking the multitasking option. Opening of other apps simultaneously would close the apps running in the background. For example, in some instances listening to the music and browsing the web at the same time is not possible. Even after the release of many firmware updates the phone was quite unstable and at this point of time SE released a press statement saying that it’s not going to release any future firmware updates for the phones like M600, P990, and W950 which required some significant improvements through firmware updates. In spite of Major flaws like (Alarm not working properly on M600) SE decided to stop the support. By the time they reconsidered their opinion regarding firmware updates many users decided not to buy anymore future mobiles from SE particularly UIQ based phones. This affected the sales of new UIQ mobiles like P1i and W960. This was a major blow to the SE and also to the UIQ hindering its development. Another aspect is the lack of cameras in M600 and W950 which failed to attract a broader audience (Even a 2 MP camera would have done it).
On February 2007 Sony Ericsson had completed the acquisition of the UIQ platform and motorola brought 50% of UIQ in october 2007. Go here for an interview with Johan Sandberg, CEO UIQ Technology by Richard Bloor of Symbian One regarding the acquisition.
UIQ was acquired by SE and Motorola in the mid 2007
This acquistion helped the UIQ, which was suffering from the lacks funds. UIQ 3 was made strong and bugfree by tieing the loose ends. Subsequently new UIQ versions are released like UIQ 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 (More info here) and some say even UIQ 4.0. But Sony Ericsson has never made it to phones for unknown reasons. Although Motorola did utilize the new versions and released phones like Z8 and Z10, they never came into the limelight, blame it on the limited availability or poor advertisement of the phones. Thus all this development has gone in vain with the announcement of the new Symbian Foundation (Depends on the role of UIQ in the new Foundation).
Now coming to another aspect why Symbian S60 became a huge hit and not UIQ? One of the reasons is Nokia offered S60 phones with the more customizable interface and non touch screen based (Many users think touch screen phones don’t last for many days). Where as SE did not offer any customizable interface like change of icons with the each theme and also in similar ways. Moreover S60 has tons and tons of applications which UIQ lacks. This is because only few developers are interested in developing applications for UIQ 3 (feared of not getting profits considering the number of units sold). To name a few are Psiloc (IR remote) and Adobe Systems (Flashlite). S60 is more basic and can be easily operated by non power users, where as UIQ looks complicated (Actually not) for users. This is because over the years Nokia had dominated the mass market, so people are more accustomed to the Nokia oriented interface and the sight of UIQ based phone with touch screen made them feel it’s complicated. So, SE succeeded only in attracting the power users who wanted try more complex things as always.
Flashlite for S60 which UIQ lacked
Sony Ericsson would have gone in the path of Nokia by using UIQ as its major platform, instead of relying on Java which restricted the multimedia capabilities of Cyber shot and Walkman series phones.
New UIQ phones G900 and G700 from SE
With the release of new UIQ based phones like G900 and G700, Sony Ericsson thought of taking UIQ technology to the next level but with the announcement of the new Symbian foundation it decided to compromise UIQ for the new Platform which is going to be released by 2010, ultimately putting an end to the User Interface for Quartz.
By Vishwanath R.S. For UIQBlog.Com
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I’d add a few things:
1. First Uiq3 devices were not only unstable but also very late to market.
2. uiq3 is far from being usable by casual users. It’s interface is hard to comprehend, lots of options are hidden in weird places. I still believe that it is superior to S60, but that’s not enough.
3. Symbian Signed scared off lots of developers. Many useful applications were not transitioned from uiq2. This meant that the new platform offered less than the previous one in some areas.
4. The prices of Uiq3 phones from SE were kept very high. This limited the market for developers. On the other hand Nokia flooded the market with cheap S60 models, creating a nice ecosystem for applications which benefited the top of the line models.
5. SE has proven that it is more interested in selling phones in bulk to network operators than the end user satisfaction. I am a former p990 user and I was hit by the end of firmware support. This phone was stolen and having limited choice of models I got a discounted p1i. But this is the last Sony Ericsson I bought for a while. I still feel the bitterness of last year’s crusade for a fix to obvious bugs.
UIQ is dead. Let’s see what the future brings…
Hello
most things have been said already: too small memory of P990, too many bugs when release to the market, although delayed for quarters (with a sudden stop of FW support althought the job was almost completed) and an “empty” stand-by screen in FO mode, just to mention the worst mistakes. SE did a miserable job, and now gets the “punishment” for it.
The only “foggy” issue in this drama for me is the position of “mobile-review”. They have been big fans of UIQ3 for a long time, having tested the P990i for weeks (not to say months) and made the famous report 4 “a view weeks with the P990i” or so. Never ever however, they mentioned that the memory of the P990 is by far too small ! Now, the report 4 has been deleted from their page, and Mobile-Review has taken an extremly negative attitude against SE. (BeiBei = fail, W902 = a phone which should be cancelled). Whats going on ?
I still do have a little hope for Hecaro, although the temptation to mave to Iphone or Blackberry is increasing quarter by quarter….
Gerhard
I’m agree with Jan
SE had the vanguard of mobile phones but it begins to think that the profit comes through quantity sales of low end phones. Doing this, SE realy increased your profit but was going to lost direction and vanguard. Your phones had launch delayed and, nevertheless, they have high prices.
Sony Xperia X1, for example, when SE release it, iphone, Samsung i900 and others phones will get almost all top market.
Iphone phone is a very good and very cheap
samsung i900 and other samsungs are very good and cheap too.
nokia too
Sony Experia x1 will be expensive and is getting late. There is almost no different and is very expensive.
Although the market for high-end phones is small, it is the main tool for marketing the company and shows their ability to mater and show up competitive. And this, SE is almost dying.
SE, together with Motorola had that one chance to challenge Nokia’s advanced phone domination by committing to UIQ. But instead of concentrating on improving and supporting UIQ, they toy around with MS WinMob, and Moto’s decision to get involved in too many platforms is legendary, if not stupid.
Entry level phones is where the money is but for smartphone market, even the number is small, is growing. If SE cant even properly manage UIQ devices, how are they going to manage their WinMob products?
Dont get me wrong, I love Sony Ericsson products since the Ericsson days but all their recent announcements are just recycles of their best sellers. A recycled T610? what the?…
all the recent SE decisions in driving UIQ forward are just… too little too late…
The longer I think about it, the less I see technical reasons for the downfall of UIQ and SE’s smartphones.
More and more, I see lack of vision, ambition and passion.
Just one example. I see the Nokia N95 as a show of exactly that, of vision, ambition and passion: Let us try to build a smartphone that goes to the limits of current technology.
What was SE’s answer to this? Did they take up the challenge? E.g. try to show that UIQ can carry a phone similar to the N95 through and then even go a little bit beyond it, with the help of touch support?
No. I think SE did not understand the N95 as a challenge. The N95 did not need an answer because there even wasn’t a question in the first place for SE…
I completely second René Brunner. It’s sad for me that UIQ is dead. But my loyalty remains to Sony Ericsson after my P1i it’s gonna be nothing but Xperia.
*nods*. ..still, if SE fixed their phone tools, released apis for creating profile support(i.e, made better extra- programs for the package), and added flash - it would’ve wiped away all the criticism all the various review- sites refer to when they say the platform has “weaknesses”. In the same way the “consensus” says a mobile device with even less development options (the iPhone) must be a great device.
So I think it should be possible to be honest enough and admit that the only real weakness with UIQ, compared to other platforms, is lack of interest from the major mobile players.
As well as that what we’re really seeing at the moment - with SE abandoning UIQ, and with the new Symbian foundation - is the definitive death of a good platform for independent developers on mobiles. And that this is by design.
I think it’s not that easy to judge that UIQ is dead. Yes maybe SE is strugling in the market now, but i think that’s a normal thing to happened for every company. Even Nokia ever faced those kind of problems at first few years of their existence. About the UIQ, i don’t think it’ll be dead that easily. I’ve tried the latest UIQ on G900, and i think it already have some nice touch on it. It become more finger friendly now, which i think it’s a nice touch, because many touchscreen devics now are focused to be finger operated, not stylus (eg. WM6 Pro on HTC Touch or WM6 Pro on Samsung Omnia).
Even with the recent announcement of the Symbian Foundation, still there’re some possibilities that UIQ can survived. The Symbian Foundation could use and improved the UIQ for their touchscreen devices and the improved S60 for their non-touchscreen devices. We can see this on Windows Mobile, which separate their OS for mobiles as WM 6 Standard that focused on non-touchscreen phones, while WM 6 Pro that focused on PPC (touchscreen phones). I think the future of UIQ existence will be known soon after we see how well the market accept the S60 touchscreen edition that will be released soon by Nokia. If it accepted well, than maybe we can say the goodbye to UIQ, but if it’s not (like the one that happened on their 7710), we can expect to see the improved UIQ by Symbian Foundation in 2010
Microsoft systematically pushes its two Windows Mobile variants more towards each other with each release, probably with the ultimate goal to unite them completely somewhere in the future, because such OS and UI variants are an absolute pain in the *ss for developers and the companies which build them alike.
OS and UI fragmentation in general is one of *the* most massive problems of the mobile landscape, and everybody is getting pretty *desperate* trying to get rid of it or at least reduce it.
As I see it, Nokia saw this clearly, and also saw that three variants of Symbian (S60, UIQ, and the Japanese MOAP stuff) are exactly two too much and ultimately only stand in the way to true success. So it took matters in its hands, coughed up hundreds of millions of dollars to end this nonsense and unite Symbian, maybe just in time before serious competition (iPhone, Android) has a chance to get really big and it its lunch.
So I think it’s time to stop dreaming that UIQ as a technological platform will survive. Nokia made sure that it does not and essentially bought SE’s consent with boatloads of money.
But I see another possible silver lining on the horizon. Much of what makes a phone a good phone is good software. And who says that good software cannot be ported to S60, especially its upcoming touch variant? I could imagine a future where there are S60 phones from Nokia with essentially the same somewhat boring “Contacts” application as ever, whereas SE comes up with S60 phones that offer something clearly superior among the lines of DreamConnect out of the box and throw in something useful like DreamLife as an added bonus.
I remember buying Sony Clie which is a PDA about 4 years ago. Sony since then get out of the PDA market. The Clie was a good device. Though I don’t use the Clie anymore, it is working good till today.
I hope that my P1i can last for another 2 years. After this I will think twice to use any Sony phone or computer products. They seem to treat us like users of disposable electronic devices.
That would be nice. It’s hard to imagine that programs will be as portable between symbian systems as they are now, though. I’m sort of dreaming about Qt over symbian, or some other platform with a good window system, that people can develop for on all phones that get the right foundation installed..
But I think it’s more probable that we’re going to get specifically developed phones that won’t have any progression as a platform in anything but name and hype - like S60 and SE’s UIQ attempts now, where anything that’s added to it won’t be developed for more than one phone.
I mean, it really is more or less by chance (or because the engineers were “forced” to by the platform requirements that anything runs on more than one phone right now.. (Or at least, so it seems.)
Well… I don’t know why UIQ is dead, but something I know is that my P1i with UIQ interface is better than any s60 !!! … btw.. I think UIQ interface is more friendly than the s60’s one.
It’s interesting to see how phone end users like Hellstormbols and Budi on the one side and programmers like me on the other side usually mean quite different things when they say “UIQ”.
Let’s assume it’s 2010. SE takes the hardware of the P1i, with touchscreen, jogdial, combined numeric/QWERTY keyboard and all. It puts the new S60 based unifified touch-capable Symbian on it. It uses the same font as the P1i now as the system font. It re-creates the UIQ themes as S60 themes. It rewrites UIQ’s Telephony, Messaging, Contacts and Calendar applications as S60 applications, with functionality duplicated.
I would say that the resulting phone would look and feel *surprisingly* like an UIQ phone, and people who prefer “UIQ” over “S60″ would get maybe 90% of their good feeling back.
How it looks to me as a programmer of an UIQ application? Well, certainly not like 90% ok, indeed nowhere 90% at all, more like 0%. That hypothetical phone is *useless* for my UIQ application because - using all the wrong classes and APIs - it simply won’t run. It will not even install!
Only after going through the process of a rewrite of all UI code, which may take several months of work for complex programs, this new SE 2010 phone will be any use at all for me.
But of course not all is bad because hopefully from that point on forward my new, rewritten program will run on *any* new Symbian phone, regardless of manufacturer.
So, now of course it’s not sure at all whether SE will really build the sketched “UIQ-like” phone in 2010, and it’s not sure at all that every nice and interesting UIQ program will be ported to the unified Symbian. But one can hope, right?
UIQ is strong enough to survive.
Its not going to die…its going to be killed if anything.
Well xombie, UIQ is not dead right now, but we all agree here (I think) that it’s seriously wounded, mainly by Sony Ericsson, and it has 8 to 9 toes in the grave.
Pitty! my P1i barely has two months and I was so passionate for it.
I can’t deny some menus in UIQ are pretty dumb, but it’s too much saying the platform is ruined.
My sincerely thanks goes to people from UIQ community all around. I truly think it’s a phenomenon UIQ has such a large community in spite of market problems.
I intend on keeping my P1i for a while. I had a eye on iPhone 3G, but with that camera and no ‘copy-and-paste’ (just to say some few things), I will not separate from my P1i, hehe =)
Before, I used to think ‘oh, ok. Once my P1i becomes obsolete, I will buy Xperia’. Now I’m pretty sure I won’t do that. And that’s not because I dislike UIQ nor P1i, but because I surely won’t buy something I can see little future in.
I surely won’t buy something I can see little future in.
Trouble is, things in the mobile space move so fast, you say that nearly nothing has a “future”. If you buy today a phone of brand/platform X, it can happen any time that when in 2 or 3 years time you need a replacement, the brand X is not there anymore, and maybe even the manufacturer itself is gone or at least changed direction wildly.
This can happen even if you decide (or just happen) to follow the market leader because you think that there you have the least chance of unexpected and fast change. Well, maybe in two years time the market leader still is leader in numbers, but has become so “uncool” that you get into a dilemma.
What other can the reaction be than “Live for the moment”? SE, UIQ, and its demise or not be damned, if the P1i is a fine phone and you like it, by all means have 2 or 3 happy years with it