line of site: Motorola and 3 unveil new Symbian UIQ device

September 09, 2003

Motorola and 3 unveil new Symbian UIQ device

yesterday, motorola and 3 announced a new addition to phones available for Hutchison's 3G service in the UK which will run the Symbian 7.0 pen based interface, which has been dubbed the Motorola A920, and will support the video messaging service that has been launched by 3 that will feature premiership highlights.

3 is under a lot of pressure from it's investors to increase subscribers, so prehaps this will help. it's widely rumored that with the returns not coming fast enough, that Vodafone or T-Mobile will snap up 3 to further their own 3G efforts. 3 currently has only 155,000 subscribers, and shooting to get to 1 million by the end of the year, so hopefully this will include some aggressive pricing. the residents of london i have talked to have said the handsets are just way too expensive to take the plunge, and the service isn't cheap either.

Interestingly enough, it's reported that Motorola is also in talks to sell it's share of Symbian to Nokia and Psion. Psion is looking to buy a 4.8% share while nokia is looking to buy an additional 13% share of $471 million USD company. What's behind this move is anyone's guess but motorola says it still plans to license symbian for it's phones, so perhaps they are just wanting to spend more time on their handset offerings and applications, and less time on the operating system.

UPDATE
seems like guy kewney has the answer to why motorola is doing this. see here.

Posted by Steve at September 9, 2003 10:20 AM | TrackBack

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Comments

anoyingly and typically Hutchison have pressured Motorola into locking the symbian OS on this phone so as a new user I can't customise it. Suffice as to say if this is 3's strategy for buying my loyalty they've surely failed.

Posted by: atatimelikethis at September 9, 2003 11:09 AM

awful. i hate that strategy, it's really short sighted. for me, the operator that can give me the biggest pipe on hardware that can allow me to do everything i need to do is the one that wins my business.

imagine if you had to go through your DSL provider to install a new app on your home computer. what would you do? i'd find a new DSL provider that had no such restrictions! it's stuff like this that will make 3G providers lose market share to the myriad wi-fi providers who are currently trying to steal their business.

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