The Story of UIQ

[Rafe]

Rafe Blandford analyses today's restoration of UIQ to its spiritual home and looks back at the chequered history of UIQ and Symbian's other licensee UIs... What does the buyout mean for end users, developers and companies in the Symbian OS world?

Read on in the full article.

[jah]

Great article. Thank you!

[krisse]

Good grief, that's one heck of an article...

It does seem odd that DoCoMo is so keen on Symbian in its handsets but isn't interested in becoming a shareholder. They make almost as many Symbian phones as Nokia, and far more than any of the other partners. (Incidentally, DoCoMo's Symbian phones look VERY nice... why can't we have stuff like that in the West?)

[Rafe]

Yes I hope you were paying attention at the back . It is an interesting story though and I think says a lot about the way the Symbian world works internally. But apologies for the strokey history beard bits.

For all Symbian sucess there's been a few mistakes along the way too. Still the UIQ stuff is good news I think. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Sony Ericsson come up with next year.

[Joar]

Thank you for a nice article!

I do like the idea of SE taking over UIQ. I did not like the initial rumours of SE chosing S60 insted of UIQ, and todays news shows it was nothing but rumours.

[N/A]

"The Symbian ownership issue will need to be confronted in the near future. It does not make sense for non-active shareholders Panasonic and BenQ/Siemens to continue to own a portion of Symbian."

Note that BenQ-Siemens is not a Symbian shareholder and never has been (BenQ has only been a Symbian licensee). Siemens is (still, until the shareholders decide to do something about it).

[krisse]

That's an odd situation for Siemens to own shares in a phone OS without having any phone-related businesses. Surely they should have sold their shares along with the mobile phone unit that they sold to BenQ?

[puterman]

Thanks for the nice history lesson. Great article!

[N/A]

Originally Posted by krisse

That's an odd situation for Siemens to own shares in a phone OS without having any phone-related businesses. Surely they should have sold their shares along with the mobile phone unit that they sold to BenQ?

As Symbian is not a public company, a shareholder cannot sell just to anybody they want to. What they can and cannot do is governed by the shareholder agreement.

Note also that Ericsson does not have any more phone-related businesses either (unless, just like with Siemens, you count their mobile network related businesses as phone-related businesses).

i'd like it.. aha..ahaa.... thank you for the nice, great and superb article!