Richard: What is Sony Ericsson's perspective on the creation of the Symbian Foundation and open sourcing the platform?

Ulf: We have been one of the most active companies driving the creation of the Symbian Foundation. We believe it will be a very good thing for the Symbian ecosystem and the mobile industry as a whole.

While there are many advantages to the new model, one significant and obvious benefit is that there will be no license cost for using Symbian OS and the new UI. This means we can accelerate our plans to use Symbian OS across a wide range of devices at a wide range of price points. To be honest, the current arrangements were hindering our plans.

With the excellent support we are seeing from chipset vendors and operators, we will be able to drive Symbian OS devices towards an ever larger portion of the 4 billion mobile phones in the world today. This drive will be a really great, great thing for the Symbian community.

Richard: While there are clear benefits to you as a handset manufacturer, what do you see as the benefits to developers?

Ulf: The first is rather obvious; developers will have only to develop for one UI to address all Symbian OS phones. While the effort in porting to or from UIQ is an overhead of only 20% to 30% on a project, it is still an overhead. Developers would rather spend this time adding features to their applications.

The other significant benefit is the access to the source code. Even if developers don't want to contribute to the code, being able to access it will be of great benefit. As you know, being able to examine the source code when your own application appears to be correct, but does not behave as expected, is often a very fast way of resolving problems.

I also believe it will drive innovation. For example, we have been working on some advanced multimedia applications for our new UIQ phones. Part of this work involves third party developers who need to see the Symbian OS source code. To provide that access today involves a costly and often lengthy legal process. This will disappear in the future.

While access to source code may not sound like a significant benefit for most developers, you just have to look at what many Universities are achieving. Currently they have programs to enable them to access the Symbian OS source code and this is enabling some really creative and innovative applications.

Richard: Many developers consider the UIQ UI framework to be superior to that of S60, yet it appears that S60 will be at the core of the new Symbian Foundation UI. Will all the advantages of UIQ be lost?

Ulf: Both ourselves and Motorola will be contributing technology from UIQ to the Symbian Foundation. UIQ has 10 years of experience and knowledge in building touch interfaces. This is clearly the user interface paradigm of the future, not just on phones but for everything from fridges to motor cars. It's a very user-friendly and intuitive way of interacting with machines. There will be a touch capability in the new Symbian Foundation platform and we expect that it will leverage the competence and technology that UIQ brings to this space. It remains to be seen exactly how this integration will happen, but I expect the best technology from every part of the ecosystem to make its way into the new platform.

This is also an advantage of the Eclipse licensing model we have adopted, anyone can add enhancements to the platform, but those enhancements have to be contributed back. This is an important lesson we've learned from looking at the problems some other operating systems are having.

Richard: So what will happen to UIQ Technology?

Ulf: We will continue to ship UIQ phones for quite some time and Motorola has publicly said it will do the same. So nothing will be stopping immediately. Over time of course we will be moving to the Symbian Foundation platform. This means that UIQ Technology will need to find a new place in the ecosystem. We are currently talking to Motorola and the management of UIQ Technology and exploring different options to find the best role UIQ Technology can play.

The Symbian Foundation will help drive convergent phones even further into the mass market. This will certainly create a demand for skilled people throughout the value chain. UIQ Technology is a really strong group of these skilled people. So there will certainly be a role for UIQ Technology, but finding exactly the right role will take some time.

Richard: Given that the UIQ platform doesn't have a long-term future, do you see a risk in developers abandoning UIQ development and leaving the new UIQ devices you have mentioned short of third party applications?

Ulf: I am sure the knowledge that UIQ has a limited lifetime will cause some concern. However, we are now shipping the G700 and G900, and Motorola will also continue to ship UIQ phones. We anticipate these phones will achieve significant volumes and therefore UIQ applications will continue to offer developers a lucrative revenue stream.

And for those developers who have concentrated on building for UIQ, we will be doing all we can to assist them in making the transition to the Symbian Foundation platform.

Richard: How are the developer services offered by Sony Ericsson going to change?

Ulf: It has been agreed that all the common activities and resources that support the developer ecosystem will be run by the Symbian Foundation. However, Sony Ericsson, like every phone manufacturer, will be differentiating our offering to consumers. This has been a key part of our strategy in delivering technologies such as Bluetooth and GPS, as well as the Walkman and Cyber-shot phones. So Sony Ericsson Developer World will continue to provide support to developers for those differentiating features, which sit on top of the platform.

Richard: By Sony Ericsson's own admission there were significant issues in moving to UIQ 3. Does the company have concerns that moving to the Symbian Foundation platform will cause similar problems?

Ulf: Of course there will be some new competencies we will have to acquire. However, we expect the transition to be less significant than the move to Symbian OS 9. We are confident that we have the capabilities to deal with this transition and we are already committed to building phones based on the new platform as soon as possible. There is a lot of enthusiasm about the move within Sony Ericsson.

Another important thing to remember is that when we moved to UIQ 3 we were the only company doing so. The transition to Symbian Foundation will be undertaken by a huge ecosystem of device manufacturers and this offers an enormous pool of experience we will all be able to tap into. So we don't have any real concerns about the transition.

Richard: Overall what do you see the creation of the Symbian Foundation achieving?

Ulf: Symbian OS is already the clear leader when it comes to technology for convergent mobile phones. Now Symbian OS has the best business model too. Together, I believe this will allow us to deliver extraordinary phones to almost every mobile phone buyer. This move will create a bigger, stronger ecosystem that offers outstanding value to operators, consumers, and developers alike.