UIQ’s CEO Johan Sandberg told Reuters in a recent interview that the company has filed for bankruptcy. UIQ was jointly owned by Sony Ericsson and Motorola, and supplied a version of Symbian to some mobile handsets. UIQ’s bankruptcy comes partly as a result of Nokia’s purchase of Symbian, formed the Symbian Foundation and said it would begin producing a royalty-free Symbian platform. CEO Johan Sandber said the owners will not provide any more financial support. He also added that there were no opportunities to create a new line of business in the current financial climate.

Sony Ericsson had said in November that it would continue to fund UIQ while it considered the options for the future of the firm. However, it seems that the handset maker has decided its pointless to continue funding UIQ. UIQ still had 200 employees as of last month.

Via: Esato & Sydostran

All About Symbian reports that both Sony Ericsson and Motorola has dropped a number of UIQ handsets planned for launch.

Source: All About Symbian

Known Issues

• ActiveX is disabled – Flash plugins and embedded video streaming do not work.
• Custom software keyboards (IME) will be buggy at best, not working at worst.
• No multilingual build – Only English is supported. Problems with other languages (and input methods) are not unexpected.
• Installation on memory cards may cause problems.
• Text wraps in overview mode.
• Main testing has been done on English HTC devices (Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, Touch, Touch Dual, Touch Cruise, TyTN and Wizard) and Samsung i900.
• Landscape mode does not take keyboard position into consideration.
• Devices with low memory might get Out Of Memory (OOM) messages.
• Opera is always running when the Widgets Manager is running.
• On devices with hight DPI some of the pre-installed widgets look small.
• When an URL is opened from a widget, there will be an extra browser window opened in the background that’s not working properly.

You can download it from HERE

Happy Browsing!

The changes at a glance:

• full compatibility to UIQ3-Phones (P990i, P1i, M600i, W950i, W960i, G700, G900)
• read/write access to notes on the phone
• SMS-Chatfeature
• universal filesync with filteroptions
• its now possible to add exceptions in ruled events
• its possible to create a backup also if the phone is not connected (Offlinebackup)
• besides this there were alot of other changes and bugfixes which do not have enought space here

Get it at fjsoft.at!

Via UIQblog.

Paris was going to be Sony Ericsson’s first slider in the P-series line-up. While it was partly based on old hardware, Sony Ericsson had made several software enhancements that would significantly speed up the phone. In addition to this, the Paris would have been based on UIQ 3.3. Anyway, what I wanted to show in this blog post was that Sony Ericsson realized that the business segment no longer has to be connected to boring colour schemes. It can be black and grey while still looking like a million bucks! I’ve known about the three colour variants for Paris (black/blue, silver/red, and black/orange) in about two months now, and this was one of the things that I liked about it – they’re trying to break the habit of “one colour variant” business & enterprise phones. Let’s hope they’ll keep it up in upcoming S60-based business phones.

Beibei was the mainstream UIQ 3.3-based smart phone that was never announced either. Beibei would – in my opinion – have been the better of the two. It brought along lots of innovation and new-thinking, one being the way you’d control the device with the scroll wheel. Just like Paris, Beibei would have shown up in three colour variants; black, black/blue and the white/red one. I’m hoping to get my hands on one, and I’ll be sure to tell you all about it if I succeed!

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Thanks phoner!]

It has to be one of the most surprising news these days: The Big 5 coorporate.

Nokia today announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Symbian Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola will contribute technology from UIQ, DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.

The annual membership fee is a bargain of 1.500$.

Plans are to get the thing rollin’ on the first half of 2009 with an expected complete framework in 2010.

Make sure you tune in to the live webcast here at 11:00 GMT.

While waiting, have a further look at the press release here and the Symbian Foundation website with the whitepaper here.

These phones will not be announced on the 17th, unless there’ll be a major change of plans just moments before the announcements on the 17th, although I extremely doubt this, seeing the announcement events are held in so many countries.

It’s sad, though, as especially the G702 (Beibei) looks to be an awesome phone. On the bright side, though, there has been talk about hardware upgrades, which I personally believe is true, and that should be the reason for the postponements.

It’ll be a mix of low-end and mid-end phones, and of course the camera flagship Shiho, which is awesome, by the way. More – or should I say everything? – on that one later this week.

I must remind you that this is probably not supposed to happen, and I’m quite sure Sony Ericsson won’t be too thrilled about it, so you might want to do some thinking before installing these.