The UIQ Evangelist

QuickBlock is an extremely cool freeware game for Sony Ericsson smart phones running UIQ 3. It makes use of the touch screen on the phone and will seriously put your reaction skills to a test!

In this game it’s all about moving and staying alive. You have to move around your orange block and avoid the green block, which will continuously morph into more - smaller - blocks.

As said, it’s freeware so give it a try. My best time is 57 now 59 seconds - see if you can beat it!

Categories: Games, Sony Ericsson, UIQ 3.0
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Heh, this is kinda unexpected because I seldom write about UIQ 2 however, when something good appears, it deserves to be mentioned in this blog and some appreciation must be given to the developer. MoStacks is a data management freeware for the SonyEricsson P800, P900 and P910i Symbian/UIQ2 smartphones inspired by Apple’s then-revolutionary HyperCard program. It’s developed by Rene Brunner who described himself as “a lone bedroom coder, and MoStack as a labor of love that gobbled up most of 2 years worth of spare time“… That’s something!

 

Categories: Apps, Links, UIQ
Tags: applications, Comments, database, Links, UIQ 2

Motorola Z8 is Motorola’s first go at creating a multimedia smart phone without it necessarily being marketed as being a smart phone. Instead, Motorola has chosen to put this phone on the market as a media phone with a design never seen before.

Now, GSMArena has in coolaboration with Mobilmania.cz posted an English review of the Motorola Z8, and the review is - for me - somewhat surprisingly positive, especially since this is Motorola’s first attempt at a UIQ 3.x phone. Of course there are some negative points of this phone; the poor camera, the lack of several connection types and of course the built-in video player with an excessive lack of video codecs. GSMArena goes as far as saying that once you’ve watched the preloaded Bourne Identity movie, the video player is doomed to oblivion. Tough crowd!

You can find the review with many photos right here!

Categories: Mobile, Motorola, UIQ 3.1
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Steve Slitchfield from All About Symbian got his review of the latest SE UIQ3 smartphone published today, and it just confirmed our impression that the W960 turned out to be far better than what some early previews pointed to (yes Eldar, i am talking about your finger print covered pre-production unit “review”). It seems the recent launch at the UK is also going very well.

I notice something i did not realized before: the W960 can play h264 MP4 files, namely the Smartphones Show clips. Michell Bak confirmed this to me, although it does lag with higher bitrates. Here´s hoping for this to be added also to the P1 in the next firmware update.

Update by Michell - I thought I might as well show you guys how well W960 performs with the H.264 codec, so I’ve uploaded a video to YouTube showing how it plays the 50th episode of the Smartphones Show. Check it out here. Video removed!

Update by Ares - I was really finding weird the existence of such a big difference in terms of video playing ability between the P1 and the W960, giving they share the same latest organizer version. And so, i went and try the same h264 clip - and the fact is the P1, with the latest firmware also plays h264! So, what happened before is that i tried h264 clips with an old firmware on my P1, and never tested those again (because meanwhile i got core player, that handled that format). So, P1 users, rejoice. My appologies for the mistake guys!

Please refer to the comments for why this text has been crossed out.

Categories: Media, Mobile, Symbian, UIQ 3.0
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UIQ Technology has just published the product sheet of the new UIQ 3.2 release - this is the operating system running on the newly announced Motorola Z10. This was a very subtle release of UIQ and Motorola didn’t even mention it in the press release. Furthermore UIQ Technology has been very slow updating the website with more info on UIQ 3.2, but now they’ve published the product sheet as said. Still missing, though, is the product description document and the UIQ 3.2 SDK document.

With UIQ getting larger by the minute, I have a gut feeling that UIQ 4.0 will be announced at 3GSM and I’ve got no doubt about the user interface will be stunning. Lots of things are pointing to that and now even UIQ has started doing so significantly updating the application icons of the bundled applications in UIQ. Watch this space!

Categories: Coming Soon, Operating Systems, Symbian, UIQ
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Lars Persson - using the pseudonym of AnotherGuest - is the popular and prolific porter of applications, mostly games, to UIQ 3. In an interview with Richard Bloor of SymbianOne.com, Lars wonders why there are not more developers porting applications to UIQ 3. Lars presents his porting process, in the hope of making porting easy for every developer.

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Categories: Links, Operating Systems, Symbian, UIQ
Tags: Developer, UIQ

I’m not sure many of you knew about this, but Motorola’s new Z10 is the first product ever to run UIQ 3.2. This new release of UIQ focuses on enhanced operator services, like IM, special MMS messages and push emails. It’s still based on Symbian OS v9.2.

Here’s how UIQ Technology describes the new release:

Rich Messaging suite
New features have been added to the UIQ messaging suite and its design has been improved: MMS postcard, one of the new applications that meet operator requirements, allows the user to send an image from the phone as a printed postcard. An Instant Messaging (IM) client is provided for chatting with friends and for viewing their on-line status information. The IM client supports the OMA IMPS 1.2 specification and enables communication with other IM clients such as MSN and Yahoo. OMA E-Mail Notifi cation 1.0 standard offers operators the possibility to provide their customers with a push email solution.

New API’s including Java MSA subset and push email
UIQ 3.2 is compliant with the Java MSA Subset (JSR-248). With this set of API’s, developers can create a wide range of media-capable applications. The release includes push email API’s, independent of email protocol, which enables integration of third-party email clients with UIQ messaging and making them appear as native applications.

Enhanced media experience in the web browser
The media experience in the web browser has been improved by adding support for enjoying and sharing media, for example by support for streaming video, the option to preview content before purchasing, the possibility to view or listen to content before the download is completed.

You’ll find more about UIQ 3.2 right here (although there’s no much to find at the moment!) and more about the Z10 can be found either on UIQ Technology’s website or in Asri’s post about it.

Any guesses what the next release will be called and who will be making use of it in at least two high-end smart phones?

Categories: Mobile, Operating Systems, Symbian, UIQ, UIQ 3.0, Web
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The news (and rumours) about a successor to the Z8 was circulating in the internet since last year. Infact, during the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, Motorola showed a couple of Z10 prototypes but reporters are prohibited from taking photos of them.

Today, Motorola officially announced the Z10, making it the 2nd Symbian UIQ 3  smartphone from the US cellphone giant. What’s underneath Z10? Here are some specs :

MOTO Z10 QUICKSPECS
- Expandable memory up to 4GB with microSD™ (32GB when available)
- Stores up to 12 full length movies and 40 hours of music by using the external memory
- OMA DRM 2.0 provides access to the highest quality Media content
- OTA Downloading for instant access to new content
- Side loading of existing Media library supported via Microsoft Media Player 11
- 30 frames per second video playback
- High resolution 2.2″ 16m TFT QVGA display
- 30 frames per second video capture at Mpeg 4
- Integrated Stereo Bluetooth™ wireless technology
How can this new Moto offering compares with Nokia’s S60 media monster such as the N95 8GB or the N81 8GB? The specifications are almost comparable to each other…

Full press release after the break…

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Categories: Coming Soon, Symbian, UIQ 3.0
Tags: Motorola, New, UIQ 3