Taking UIQ to the mass market is more than an exercise in designing and building phones at the right price point. "Operators place a huge demand on mobile phone vendors to meet strict criteria in both phone hardware and phone UI on their mass market phones," says Mats. "In total there are some forty thousand requirements that a mass market UIQ phone needs to meet. Phone manufacturers have always had some flexibility in meeting these requirements for high end UIQ phones. When you try to address the volume market, however, operators are less flexible, because of the testing and support issues."

UIQ 3.3 is therefore something of a watershed for UIQ Technology. Mats sees UIQ 3.3 as equally suited to the creation of high end business orientated phones, as UIQ has been in the past. It is now positioned, however, to meet a significant proportion of operators' requirements. This gives UIQ licensees the ability to deliver mass market phones, particularly those offering multimedia capabilities.

UIQ 3.3 also delivers what Mats describes as a "new user experience", which is the culmination of work that has been carried out over a number of releases. "We now have consistence support for five-way navigation and the standard red and green call buttons," says Mats. "We have also cleaned up the interface and made sure all the UI navigations are consistent."

UIQ 3.3 offers a cleaner more consistent interface.

The inclusion of Opera 9.5 is part of this improved user experience. "We now have a Web experience that is similar to the desktop," says Mats. "It is more intuitive, with a Web page overview and page panning. The underlying layout engine has also been improved and offers faster page loads and more accurate rendering. In addition, Opera 9.5 delivers Opera widgets to UIQ through the UIQ widget dashboard, which will offer many new opportunities for operators and Web developers."

The focus on operator requirements continues with features designed to "secure compliance with the major global operator's brand experience." This means UIQ 3.3 strengthens the operator enablers, providing operators with a customizable application launcher, folders, and widget dashboard. There is also an operator configuration package and an OMA IMPS 1.3 compliant messaging suite with unified MMS and SMS composer.

"This release is an important step in evolving the platform towards the mass-market," says Mats. "With UIQ 3.3 we are delivering a platform that conforms strongly to operator requirements and allows them to carry their branding into the UI. At the same time we are delivering on the promise of offering the UIQ platform on multiple form factors and in phones at multiple price points. As a result, I would expect to see UIQ 3.3 phones covering at least the range of price points you see in S60 devices."

When UIQ was launched it was perceived as a high end platform for business phones, the emphasis is now much more on mass market multimedia phones. "When UIQ was launched the market suggested that it was business users who had the need for smartphones," says Mats. "The explosion in the Internet, social networking, and the exchange of images and videos has meant that the demand for feature rich smartphones has moved into the mass market. The release of UIQ 3.3 is about enabling our licenses to deliver the right functionality at the right price point to that market."

The move to mass market phones has also involved considerable "under the hood" work. "We now have a requirement to be able to run on much less powerful processor than might have traditionally been associated with a UIQ phone," says Mats. "As a result there has been a considerable effort on our part to optimize and tune the performance of UIQ."

Another important aspect of UIQ 3.3 is that it will be the single version of the platform used by all UIQ licensees for their next generation of phones. Until now Sony Ericsson has been using UIQ 3.0, while Motorola both UIQ 3.1 and UIQ 3.2. "Moving both our licensees to the same version of UIQ offers our licensees better value," says Mats. "A single code base and shared integration experience means that we can consolidate our support and make more resources available to solve common problems."

From a developers perspective UIQ 3.3 offers a forward compatible extension to the earlier UIQ 3.x versions: Any C++ applications written for a currently available UIQ phone will run on any new phone using UIQ 3.3. For C++ developers there are no significant changes or additions to the APIs. Rather UIQ Technology has been focusing on improving the tools for C++ developers with support for on-device debugging in Carbide.c++ v1.3 Developer and Professional Editions. In addition, UIQ is now supported in the Carbide.c++ UI Designer. "With UI Designer developers can now literally create a UIQ interface for their application in minutes, rather than the hours it currently takes," says Mats.

Java developers get a fully compliant implementation of the subset of the Mobile Services Architecture (JSR-248). In addition, Java developers also have access to the Security and Trust Services API for J2ME™ (JSR-177), the Location API for J2ME™ (JSR-179), the SIP API for J2ME™ (JSR-180), the Payment API (JSR-229), and the Java™ Binding for the OpenGL® ES API (JSR-239).

The introduction of widget support in Opera 9.5 also opens up UIQ to Web developers. These developers will be able to deliver their Web site or Web service in an application like package to UIQ users.

Widgets are available through the UIQ widget dashboard.

"Addressing the mass market is not a trivial exercise," says Mats. "Fortunately our licensees have this experience. With their help UIQ 3.3 now complies with a significant portion of operator requirements. We have significantly reduced the lead time for developing mass market phones and are well on the way to making UIQ a key player in that market."

A Beta SDK and documentation on UIQ 3.3 are now available from the UIQ Developer Community Web site.