UIQ Announce Planned Layoff of 200 Employees

[Ewan]

In the wake of today's news of the Symbian Foundation being set up, UI company UIQ have announced plans to layoff of 200 employees (reports BLT.se). Currently the majority of the 375 staff are employed in the Ronneby offices, with the balance of staff in two foreign offices in London and Budapest. These offices will probably close. Further details will be announced by UIQ this afternoon.

Read on in the full article.

No wonder... Recently I had the opportunity to play with a W960i. Man, that UI is really bad...

[jah]

A real shame. UIQ2 on the P800 and P9x0 were wonderfully simple and easy to use. So many of us tried to tell SE that they had made a mistake with UIQ3 (e.g. at conferences) but nothing changed. Perhaps if there is no spirit or passion to innovate and develop then the company will fail. Hopefully good UIQ engineers will now work on the next generation S60.

[ares]

Well, i personally don´t like s60 v3 either, and find the UIQ3 ui on the P1 and specially G900 very good

Hopefully the new unified platform will bring something that joins the best parts of both s60 and UIQ

[krisse]

Series 90 (Nokia 7710) a stylus phone didn't work , now UIQ (another stylus UI) is going down. iPhone although touch screen does not have a stylus.

iPhone has only been out for a year, and has only sold about 5 million out of total yearly phone sales of 1000 million. I wouldn't call a 0.5% market share a huge success. You shouldn't mistake hype for actual sales.

The 7710 was dead before it was even released, so it couldn't have been anything to do with the stylus. Nokia had already killed off the Series 90 interface in favour of merging everything into S60, and the 7710 was released simply because it was already ready for production. They didn't advertise it properly and no follow-up phones were ever released or even announced.

[jah]

The Nokia 7710 was a fantastic design, the UI which as developed 2 years before UIQ3 was also superb. Very fast hand writting recognition. Very high res screen, highest res screen for many years for a Smartphone. The slate format also preceeded the iPhone by 3 years! There is a bif difference between working technology and making it attractive / appealing to customers. I am not a normal customer so I can not say why the 7710 did not have much market traction. But the Hildon like UI was really very good and with the final FW update very quick. Still one of my favourite devices after the R380 and P910. But nothing now beats the E90 :-)

Hi, as far as I known Hildon has not ended. It has been ported to mobile Linux used in Nokia internet tablet (the Maemo platform).

Rene