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nokia goes pen based with series 90

this is really just a pointer more than anything else, but forum nokia has released the inital specs and concept SDK for it's series 90 user interface for the symbian OS.

they have obviously chose not to go with using UIQ to compete on it's pen based offerings - that is their devices that would compete head to head with the likes of the p900. In the past nokia has stayed away from pen based devices, except in asia where they sell the 6108.

for those of you who are confused on who owns what in the symbian world - here's the lowdown:

symbian, ltd is the company that makes the underlying operating system and is owned by Ericsson, Nokia, Panasonic, Psion, Samsung Electronics, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.

UIQ is a wholly owned subsidiary of symbian, ltd, and makes the pen based user interface layer for symbian OS that is licensed for use on devices made by the likes of Sony Ericsson and BenQ. They otherwise concentrate on advanced user interfaces for the Symbian OS, and are located in Sweden.

Series 60, Series 80, Series 90 is the keypad driven user interface on top of symbian OS that is owned by nokia, and is found on such devices as the nokia 3650, n-gage, and the nokia communicator. Series 60 has been licensed to sendo which they have included on their Sendo X device. Sendo has made their own enhancements to the series 60 OEM core.

still confused? some analogies: UIQ and series 60 are to symbian os as gnome and KDE are to the linux core. nokia licensed series 60 to sendo like palm source licensed the palm os to sony for their cleo devices.

each user interface as well as the underlying OS has it's own developer program, as well as the developer programs for the devices that use them. yes, this makes it confusing for developers as well. good natured object-oriented MVC design can help developers target multiple platforms and devices at once, but man, does it need to be sorted out. there's a lot of activity by the various developer programs to do this, but for everyone's sake i hope it gets streamlined soon.