UIQ

» see uiq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

It started life as Quartz, which was Symbian's name for the pen-driven option in a set of three interface designs it offered to licensees. The first Quartz phones never reached a shop. Psion's "Odin", a joint effort with Motorola, was cancelled in January 2001 and took a chunk of Psion's share price with it. What survived was a lighter rewrite, shown in 2002 and shipped that year on the Sony Ericsson P800.

UIQ stood for User Interface Quartz, and what it actually was is a layer sitting on top of Symbian OS that decided what the screen looked like and how you touched it. Symbian handled the phone. UIQ handled the part a person interacts with, and its answer was a large resistive screen worked with a stylus, under a flip-down numeric keypad you could remove entirely. Third-party developers could write native C++ against the SDK or ship Java, and every UIQ 3 phone was served by one core SDK, which was more than Symbian's other branches could say.

Sony Ericsson was a real brand in Turkey in those years, on billboards and in every shop window, so the P-series was visible here in a way most of this platform's story was not. Visible and priced out of reach. A P900 in 2004 cost what a used car cost, and the people carrying one in Ankara were carrying it for work. I was a university student on a phone that sent messages. The stylus phone was something you looked at through glass and then went back to the Nokia in your pocket.

~ the record ~

~ the stylus years ~

Sony Ericsson was the platform's main customer and effectively its reason for existing. Motorola built UIQ devices too, then walked away in 2004 to try Linux, selling off its Symbian stake at the same time. Nokia, which was busy building S60, shipped exactly one UIQ device: the Nokia 6708, which was a rebadged BenQ P31 and reads today as a hedge nobody wanted to talk about.

In November 2006 Sony Ericsson bought UIQ Technology outright, and in October 2007 Motorola came back and bought half of it, launching the RIZR Z8 on the platform. On paper that was the strongest UIQ had ever been: two of the largest phone makers in the world sharing ownership of the same interface, with a common SDK and a coherent developer story. The last release, UIQ 3.3, sat on Symbian OS v9.3.

~ the actual end ~

The Symbian Foundation was announced in June 2008 to pull Symbian and its interfaces into one open-source stack, and it chose S60. That decision did not merely disadvantage UIQ, it removed the thing UIQ was built on top of. There was no longer a Symbian to be a user interface layer for. Sony Ericsson's own press release that September described an industry lining up behind the Foundation, and the reading between the lines was not difficult.

Motorola cancelled its 2009 UIQ line, including a device codenamed "Ruby" that would have shipped as the Razr3, and went to Android instead. Sony Ericsson went to Windows Mobile and then Android by way of the Xperia. UIQ Technology filed for bankruptcy in January 2009 with two owners who had both already left. Ronneby is a town of about twelve thousand people, and for seven years it held the interface on half the smartphones in Europe that were not Nokias.

~ the next chapter ~

UIQ solved the touchscreen phone before there was a market for one, and solved it in the way the hardware of 2002 permitted: a resistive panel poked with a plastic stick, reading handwriting that mostly came out right. Everything about that answer became wrong in June 2007, when a capacitive screen made the stylus look like an apology rather than a tool. The platform's response was to keep the pen and add a keypad, which is a reasonable engineering position and a fatal product one.

What is easy to miss now is that the P800 shipped a general-purpose pocket computer with a touchscreen and third-party software five years before the iPhone, and that the reason it did not turn into the future is not that it was bad. It is that Symbian offered three interfaces and the phone industry could not agree on one, and when it finally did agree the winner was chosen by whoever had the most handsets in the field. UIQ lost a committee vote. The company shut a year later.

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