Some of the readers may have seen this post floating around on the major forums, claiming that "Symbian UIQ is slowly dying":
It looks like Sony Ericsson performed a suicide to its own platform...I don't see UIQ dying out in the short run, and here's why:
First reason is the very rare models of UIQ devices.
Compared with S60 and the unstoppable announcements from Nokia regarding high end smartphones or multimedia computers even HTC with Windows Mobiles, all of them keep their lines up fresh and always updated with the latest technological standards.
Most importantly the platform stopped to be exited since P900.
P800 was great and revolutionary for its time even, after the many delays P800 did very well and it is what made UIQ a success, P900 it was a P800 with better design, better screen and UIQ 2.1, nothing special but acceptable, P910 was totally outdated when it came out offering nothing new from P900 instead of a very bad QWERTY keyboard, finally the P990 was the disaster of the whole platform taking it to the hole everything that was UIQ related after that... The major lacks the better competition and mostly the extremely buggy UIQ 3.0 made the P990 a disappointment.
UIQ is meant to be for high end devices at least this is what we learn with P800 but it looks like mother Sony Ericsson still doesn't get it... Even the latest Sony Ericsson G700 and G900 UIQ based smartphones don't even offer QuadBand support with EDGE. If you can't even offer that then...there is nothing to say.
UIQ is a great platform and we hear so many nice additions for its next version. We really hope Sony Ericsson has something nice to announce really soon along with many high end devices base on it.
Source: Mivadika
- Although the P1 and the W960 (along with previous SE models) suffer without HSDPA or EDGE connectivity in the phones, these are clearly hardware constraints set by SE. The Motorola Z8 does both EDGE and HSDPA, so that's clearly not an issue in the platform.
- Don't judge on the P990. That was a fiasco. At least the P1i fixed up many of the issues in the P990.
- Apart from the high end SE phones (the P1 and the W960), we're starting to see SE move UIQ to mid-high end range phones (the G series), so we should see more development on the platform. Also, with Motorola joining the UIQ wagon, there should be even more developers and users. No way that's going to die in the short run.
- Dedicated blogs like these. I mean, you won't find much information or blogs for a dying platform, right? Take a look at UIQBlog, or Symbian UIQ Freeware. People actually buy the phone and set up blogs to help others in the community.
