According to a report on the UK's The Register, UIQ has filed bankcruptcy in Sweden. Over the summer, Sony Ericsson and Motorola both committed a number of phones to the UIQ platform. And according to the report, they have now been canceled. Another sign is Motorola investing heavily in Linux platform. More from The Register's report:
But by 2004 it was clear that the biggest threat to Symbian and would-be Symbians (including Microsoft and Linux) was the competitor the executives had feared all along - dumbphones. The demand for features that justified the complexity and expense of a smartphone simply wasn't there. After one notorious quarter in which market leader Nokia lost six market share points, no manufacturer ever neglected their midrange feature phones again. And the ODMs (original device manufacturers) weren't exactly queuing up to spend money on a smartphone OS.
As Jean-Louis Gass?e described it this summer, when Nokia took over Symbian and announced it was giving away the code:
"Handset makers don?t (or didn?t) actually care for software and don?t want to pay anything of significance for it. They (and their masters, the carriers) spend much more money on the nicely printed cardboard box than on the software inside," he wrote.
So smartphone development became a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. The demand didn't justify the investment. Extra investment didn't stimulate demand.
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