UIQ: to open or to open source?

Tony Cripps, Senior Analyst and Service Manager, and Adam Leach, Principal Analyst

Sony Ericsson has invited rival phone vendors to become shareholders in its UIQ Technology subsidiary. UIQ Technology licenses the UIQ user interface framework and application suite for use with Symbian OS. Sony Ericsson believes additional shareholders will increase UIQ's independence within the market and would also lower the operating cost of UIQ technology.

The latter point is undoubtedly true, but we do not believe that additional shareholders will lead to either greater independence or openness for UIQ licensees. Those goals, we believe, would be better served by open sourcing UIQ.

UIQ's profitability (or otherwise) was never transparent while it was part of Symbian. While the UIQ framework clearly helped sell several million Symbian OS licences, justifying Symbian's continued investment, that link was broken when UIQ transferred to Sony Ericsson on 2 February 2007.

The Sony Ericsson acquisition makes a lot of sense. Sony Ericsson becomes master of its own smartphone destiny and is less beholden to other more dominant phone vendors. But the pressure is now on Sony Ericsson to make the necessary investment in UIQ to keep it competitive with Nokia's S60 and to justify investment on an ongoing basis. But whether it would be able to do this is unclear. Sony Ericsson is a relative minnow in handset terms compared with Nokia and Motorola, both of which can afford to spend untold millions of dollars on developing and maintaining their own smartphone platforms.

Attracting outside investment for UIQ would not only improve UIQ's financial position, it would add a layer of vendor neutrality that S60 - the only real alternative application platform for phone vendors wishing to launch handsets on Symbian OS - cannot achieve. It could be perceived that Sony Ericsson is trying to have its cake and eat it, by wanting the strategic advantage of owning its own smartphone platform but at the same time wanting other phone vendors to subsidise it.

At least, that is the theory. The problem, as we see it, is that there is no guarantee that any of these hoped for outcomes will actually occur.

OEM interest in UIQ has never been high. Sony Ericsson, by far its biggest supporter, has only offered six handsets that use the software since 2003. Meanwhile, Motorola, UIQ's second-string team, has offered five, including its new RIZR Z8 (although some of these can be considered variants rather than separate products). Other than that, Arima has built two UIQ devices and BenQ two (including one sold in China by Nokia as the 6708).

In comparison, upwards of 50 designs have been launched based on the S60 in roughly the same time period and they continue to appear in large numbers. Admittedly, most of these have been Nokia designs. However, nine have been from S60 licensees - the same number as non-Sony Ericsson UIQ designs. The economics of S60 clearly stack up better over the long term than those of UIQ, even if Nokia remains the primary beneficiary.

As such, if Sony Ericsson's strategy for UIQ does fail - and we suspect it will - we would encourage the company to go the whole nine yards and to open source UIQ. Radical as this may sound, a precedent was set by Access Co, which in December 2006 released the Hiker Application Framework for its Access Linux Platform (ALP) to the open source community, under the Mozilla Public Licence. The move to open source was in this case motivated to stimulate demand and demonstrate willingness to set and adopt standards in a currently highly fragmented area.

There would be several benefits of the open source approach for UIQ. A truly open application framework for Symbian would generate greater demand from phone vendors than the opportunity to become a shareholder. UIQ would also benefit from developments made by other phone vendors using the UIQ framework, lowering its operating costs. OEMs could then make use of these developments without sacrificing their own differentiation.

A move to open source by UIQ would also put Nokia under pressure to re-evaluate S60 software licences and fees. It would additionally provide the Symbian ecosystem with a rival to emerging open source, Linux-based handset platforms, which look set to become increasingly potent forces over the next few years.

Tony Cripps is a senior analyst and service manager of Ovum's Mobile User Experience advisory service. His research focuses on relating software and software markets supporting next-generation mobile services to the requirements for creating good user experiences.

Adam is a principal analyst for the Mobile User Experience advisory service. His research at Ovum focuses on open software platforms, mobile application development and security, next-generation devices and their relationship with the consumer electronics market.