Tuesday, October 16, 2007

UIQ + Motorola

So Motorola bought 50% of UIQ from Sony Ericsson. I guess all we can say for certain is that Motorola is showing its dedication to the platform.

And of course, some people start speculating about a possible move of UIQ from Symbian to some other OS (like Linux). It's interesting how these speculations keep popping up again and again, even though the whole thing wouldn't just be (almost) impossible, but also completely pointless. You couldn't port UIQ or S60 to run on another OS, because Symbian is quite different from all other systems, and the UIQ and S60 code is filled with excentric Symbian idioms. Sure, you could spend a few years reimplementing the Symbian API:s on top of some other system, but the most important reason for moving away from Symbian would be to get rid of those API:s. The main problem with using Symbian isn't licensing fees, but that developing for it is such a nightmare.

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