Sony Ericsson to acquire UIQ Technology

Interestingly enough, this post is neither about Nokia nor any of their products as you would expect from a Forum Nokia blog post. It's about Sony Ericsson and their press release regarding acquiring UIQ Technology. Many popular mobile blogs (e.g. here, here and here) have already drawn our attention to this piece of great news, but it seems they have all missed to point out a very important consequence of this step.

Or it might be only me who's a little bit worried about Symbian's future? Not that much, but still. You know, I have read couple of articles about the future of mobile operating systems and was a bit worried about that lots of them predict the fall of Symbian in contrast with the rise of Linux. For example, the last report I've read on this topic was made by ARCchart and can be freely downloaded from here: http://www.arcchart.com/reports/mos.asp. They say that one of Symbian's biggest disadvantage is that Nokia owns too much shares in it, which might scare off other manufacturers, mobile companies from licensing it. In contrast with Linux (as they say), which is not suffering from a similar effect, thus might look more desirable for mobile companies. Oddly enough, even Nokia is making experiments in the area of producing mobile devices (Nokia 770, Nokia 330 - not confirmed that latter runs on Linux) with Linux operating system, which might be a base for rumours, too.

So the point in my opinion is that Sony Ericsson's commitment to UIQ might significantly strengthen the position of Symbian OS in the market of mobile operating systems. Not as if Symbian wasn't already in a strong position for the moment, but hopefully it will have positive effects in mid- and long-term plans, too.

Finally note that as I've already written I was in London on the Smartphone Show, where I picked up a booklet from Symbian's booth. The title of the booklet is "The Insight Series with David Wood" (check it out at http://www.symbian.com/symbianos/insight/index.html) and it's about the thoughts of Symbian's EVP for research about basically anything that has something to do with mobility and of course concerns Symbian. What has really captured my attention is a chapter about The hidden value of the mobile operating system. In this chapter, David Wood explains why he thinks that even though Linux is a real alternative on the market of mobile OSs, Symbian doesn't (yet) have to worry about it.

Comments are warmly welcome!

Migrated from Forum Nokia Blogs.

Cheers,

Tote