Richard: How much of a surprise was it to see Sony Ericsson launch a phone based on Windows Mobile?

Mats: I came to UIQ Technology from Sony Ericsson in June last year. At Sony Ericsson I had been involved in planning the product portfolio for three years, so for me it was not a surprise.

The important thing for UIQ is that we have a really interesting road map for the development of phones with Sony Ericsson and Motorola. This will see UIQ implemented across a broad portfolio of phones; from the high end to mid-range, and both with and without touch screens. This strategy is really about expanding the market reach for UIQ powered phones through a world class user experience. So the release of one high end phone by Sony Ericsson that uses another operating system is not an issue for us.

Richard: UIQ has been talking about user experience for a couple of years now. During that time the iPhone has been released and is seen by many as the benchmark for touchscreen phones. How has this affected UIQ?

Mats: We have been working with touch screens for almost ten years now, so in some ways the iPhone has made no difference. However, the utilization of a touch screen has evolved over those ten years. The key change has been the move away from a pen based touch interaction. In many respects this is a natural evolution of the mobile phone UI, to move to touch based interaction using fingers. It just happened that Apple did this first.

Richard: Given this change, do you still see a role for key based phones, particularly given that the first key based UIQ phone has only recently been released?

Mats: I see it very much as a case for 'the more the merrier.' There is certainly not one mode of interaction that will work for all mobile phone users. Even within a touch screen environment there can be a progression through modes of interaction, from physical buttons, to finger navigation, to stylus interaction. If you look at the G700 and G900 from Sony Ericsson, the user can interact with hardware buttons, use their finger on the screen controls, but for the jotter application the phones have a small stylus for detailed drawing or text entry; because that interaction would not be possible with a finger.

Richard: One problem with finger navigation on mobile phones would appear to be the limited screen size. While the Sony Ericsson G700 and G900 enable a more finger orientated navigation, on a 2.4 inch screen the interactions possible must be limited.

Mats: It does have limitations, but advances in touchscreen hardware are minimizing these. For example the Sony Ericsson G700 and G900 have a flush touch screen, without the 'swimming pool' design of earlier phones. This makes finger interaction on a small screen much easier.

However, we have wide screen displays, both wide QVGA and wide VGA, on the UIQ road map. And the beautiful thing about UIQ is that we have already implemented a UI framework where you can take UIQ as it is today and run it on these wide screen displays.

More importantly we are not only an open OS platform, but an open UI too. We offer our licensees the ability to change the look and feel of the UI using tools that are already familiar to graphic designers. So, while it would be somewhat pointless, we could easily create a phone that looked like an iPhone and still have all of today's third party UIQ 3 applications running on that phone.

Richard: While you have mentioned that UIQ's focus is on creating a world class user experience, several of the UI features on the Sony Ericsson G700 and G900, such as the scrolling idle screen panels, have been developed by Sony Ericsson. That suggests some limitation in UIQ's UI development.

Mats: Sony Ericsson has indeed innovated on top UIQ, however I don't see this as suggesting any limitations, quite the contrary. Mobile phone manufacturers have a lot of experience in UI development. So, we work closely with both Sony Ericsson and Motorola in developing the UIQ UI.

Richard: There has been a lot of speculation around whether Symbian OS should or will start appearing on non-phone based devices. Do you see anything non-phone in UIQ's future?

Mats: No, I see UIQ concentrating on phones. What you will see changing is the form factors of the phones running UIQ. In the past UIQ may have been optimized towards certain form factors, but now we are working to make it easier for phone manufacturers to implement a wide variety of phones.

When I worked at Ericsson, I remember that there were plans to have Epoc 32 running on a wide variety of devices. However, I don't see that we currently have a problem in not running on the desktop or in music devices. This is because I firmly believe that in the future the mobile phone will be the dominant device, they will be the most common music player and more people will use them than desktop PCs.

Richard: The mobile phone will undoubtedly evolve. How much work does UIQ do to track new technologies - like flexible screens - that could create new device paradigms that in turn could disrupt the design of mobile phones?

Mats: We certainly look at those technologies and regularly check to see if they could be disruptive. At the moment I don't see flexible screen technology on the immediate horizon. The technologies that will have the most immediate impact are haptic and capacitive screens, although powering the pen needed to get the most of these screens will be an interesting challenge.

One of the problems with some of the new technologies, like flexible screens or laser keyboards, is that they seem to forget there is no working surface in the mobile world, no table to stand things on, no surface to project onto.

Having said that, I think there is much more flexibility to come in mobile phone design; unlike the PC where designs seem to gravitate back to a box with a screen above and a keyboard in front. We already have three established form factors for mobile phones, the candy bar, the flip, and the slide: I would not be surprised if something new emerges.

However, from UIQ's standpoint we have designed a UI that will work well over a variety of form factors and using a variety of input methods, so I'm confident we have a solution that will work on any future form factor that new technologies might enable.

Richard: You mentioned that UIQ's strategy is to expand penetration into the mass market, how important is gaining new licensees to this strategy?

Mats: In January 2007 we were a company of 150 people, at the end of last year we had grown to 350 and we are also keeping a number of contractors busy with specific projects. This growth reflects significant developments we have in the pipeline with Sony Ericsson and Motorola. As such we believe we can reach our goals with the licensees we have.

That is not to say that we don't want to grow our licensee base. However, it is something for the future, as expanding too rapidly with new licensees could have a disruptive effect. Right now we need to concentrate on our growth strategy, when this comes to fruition I believe the new licensees will follow.