Final curtain for UIQ Symbian interface
According to a report by Swedish online magazine mobil.se, the Swedish software company UIQ has given notice to all of its 270 employees. UIQ produces one of the two interfaces for the Symbian OS smartphone operating system. Smartphones with this interface were produced by UIQ's owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, among others, but both vendors recently decided to abandon the platform.
Sony Ericsson had already announced the end of UIQ at the Symbian Smartphone Show last October. The Japanese-Swedish vendor still plans to provide financial support for UIQ for some time to give the company a chance for negotiating a partial or complete takeover by an investor. Individual employees are also to receive support, for example if they decide to start their own business. Motorola is restructuring its mobile phone sector and plans to exclusively use its own P2k platform as well as Android and Microsoft Windows Mobile in the future.
The Symbian Foundation was initially formed to create a uniform platform with a common user interface framework from the competing UIQ and S60 interfaces. In the meantime, however, Nokia has presented an improved S60 interface that is optimised for touch screen operation.
(jbe)
