UIQ Technology
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[edit] The Company
UIQ Technology develops and licenses an open software platform to the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers and supports licensees in the drive towards developing a mass market for open mobile phones. UIQ based phones are powerful and give access to enterprise applications, email, multimedia clips and web pages. UIQ is, for example, used in mobile phones from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, BenQ and Arima.
The company is focused on usability design, software engineering, product realization, technical consulting, sales and marketing. UIQ Technology, established in 1999, is a fully owned subsidiary of Symbian Ltd.
On November 7th 2006, Sony Ericsson announced they had agreed (in principle) to buy UIQ from Symbian Ltd. and run it as a separate subsidiary. The UIQ products would be "openly available, licensed on equal terms to all its licensees". The sale will complete in the next few months "pending regulatory approval and customary closing conditions".
UIQ Technology is based in Ronneby, Sweden and is situated in the Soft Center Science & Research Park.
The General Manager is Johan Sandberg.
[edit] The Platform
UIQ 3 is the latest version of the platform, based upon Symbian OS v9.1, which serves as the core operating system. Developers who are interested in targeting the family of UIQ 3 phones have a much better story than previous releases, since all UIQ 3 phones are served by a single, core SDK - available from the UIQ developer portal.
The original version of the platform was known as Quartz.
[edit] History
1998
- Spring - Ericsson Mobile Communications in Lund set up a development lab in Ronneby called Mobile Applications Lab. This was the precursor of UIQ Technology.
- June - Symbian Ltd. was established in London.
1999
- 1 April - The company became part of Symbian Ltd, and the new company name was Symbian AB. Work was focused on Quartz 6.0, which was the pen-based communicator later known as UIQ.
- December - Number of permanent employees: 21
2000
- February - Quartz was publicly announced.
- May - Johan Sandberg was appointed General Manager.
- September - The first product release of Quartz 6.0 was made.
- December - Number of permanent employees: 78.
2001
- April - Quartz 6.1 was released.
- December - Number of permanent employees: 76.
2002
- February - The company name was changed to UIQ Technology AB and the product was re-named UIQ.
- March - UIQ 2.0 was released.
- December - Number of permanent employees: 85.
- December - The first UIQ phone, Sony Ericsson P800, was released.
- December - UIQ Selected Partner Program was launched for UIQ 2.1.
2003
- February - UIQ 2.1 was made public.
- October - The first UIQ 2.1 based phone, Sony Ericsson P900, reached the market. Motorola A920 was launched.
- December - Number of permanent employees: 102.
2004
- February - UIQ 3 was announced at 3GSM.
- February - Motorola A925, Sony Ericsson P910, BenQ P30, Motorola A1000 reached the market.
- December - Number of permanent employees: 110.
- December - UIQ Selected Partner Program was launched for UIQ 3.
2005
- September - First UIQ 3 phone was announced - the Sony Ericsson P990
- September - UIQ developer program launched
2006
- February - Second and third UIQ 3 phones are announced - the Sony Ericsson M600 and the Sony Ericsson W950 - as the platform moves into high volume, mid-tier devices
- February - UIQ developer program launches premium level membership and hosts WDF developer track at 3GSM
- November - Sony Ericsson announces that it has agreed to buy UIQ
