UIQ is back in the game

Its lack of popularity has always struck me as a little odd because, theoretically at least, it should be easier and more intuitive to use than Series 60 (S60).

S60 suffers from far more limited input methods for the user, meaning you have to scroll around the display rather than just point at what you want as you would on a desktop PC.

This can be compared to Windows Mobile, where all the most interesting new devices run the PocketPC variant rather than Smartphone.

However, for whatever reason – lack of investment, expensive devices and a huge loss of ground to Nokia’s relatively stable S60 – it failed to gain much momentum and the manufacturers who had been building devices on it fell away.

It’s almost a year since Sony Ericsson announced it was buying out everyone else to become the sole owner of UIQ. This made sense, as they were the main users, and having full control allowed them to customise as needed, rather than trying to keep a generic product alive or struggle with sleeping partners.

But Motorola has just decided it is interested in UIQ again. It did have some UIQ-based devices some years ago; most notably the A920, which was the first 3G smartphone sold over here. But it gradually stopped releasing UIQ products and concentrated on Linux for smartphones, especially in the Chinese market. Now this has changed, first with the MOTORIZR Z8 (based on UIQ 3.1) and now with the announcement it is taking up a 50 per cent stake in UIQ.

Motorola says this is to allow it to develop “feature-competitive multimedia devices”, which has to be more interesting than another revamp of the feature-poor RAZR series.

The future of ePaper?

The ePaper concept has been around for a while now, but Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo has come up with a novel new use for it.

Rather than reading documents on an LCD display, they can be “printed” onto a piece of reusable electronic “paper”, or ePaper. Unlike LCDs, ePaper needs no power once it has been written to (unless you’re changing the writing) and, as it doesn’t contain glass, it is very light and flexible. The reading angle is close to 180 degrees, and can be read in bright sunlight when it has a matt coating.

This paper is a sandwich of two conductive outer layers, with a honeycomb centre containing dyes and charged particles. When electricity is passed through, the charged particles are attracted to one surface or the other, remaining in position when the power is removed. Depending on which surface the articles are against, you can either see them or the dye, giving a stable two-colour display.

Now NTT DoCoMo has taken the technology to mobile phone keypads. Rather than moulding the numbers and characters onto the keys, they are using California-based SiPix Imaging’s Microcup ePaper keypad. This allows the handset to dynamically reconfigure the keypad dependent on the application running, while not suffering from the fragile and power-hungry nature of doing something similar with an LCD display.

This is obviously an advantage when using non-Western character sets, or even for simple tasks like blanking everything out except the unlock key sequence when you’ve enabled the keypad lock.

The performance isn’t perfect at the moment (it takes around a second to update the pad) and the current model doesn’t have high resolution (it uses fixed character shapes rather than a dot matrix) but both can be improved as the technology advances and production units become available.

Airline check-in on your mobile

As a frequent business traveller, anything that makes getting through the airport faster is a bonus.

Mobiles are already being used to generally speed things up; flying on Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) you can get SMS notifications of your flight’s status, including when it is available for check-in. You can check-in by SMS or using an IVR system, and – if you are in Scandinavia – go straight through to the gate without needing a physical boarding pass, as long as you have your frequent flier card registered. Just skipping the queues (if you’re travelling with hand baggage only) makes this a huge time and stress saver.

This works fine, as long as you always use the same airline and know the system. Others may want you to check-in using the web and print out your own pass (not very useful if you are travelling away from your office), but some have no time savers at all and require you to stand in a long queue at the airport.

Now the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has approved a new standard of barcode check-ins. This not only lets you do the check-in itself via your mobile, but delivers a 2D barcode to you that can then be read using a scanner at security and the gate.

There are still some processes that need to be defined in order to standardise this for all airlines and airports, but the IATA hopes to be completely rid of the old style magnetic strip passes by 2010.

They believe this will save the airline industry £250 million a year, making the process easier and faster for passengers too.

Why Wi-Fi?

BT Openzone, in conjunction with Symbian, is running a developers competition to produce a useful application for Wi-Fi hotspots.

To win the main prize of £1,000, entrants have to write a native Symbian program that finds some use for Wi-Fi in its operation. The judging criteria includes looking for an innovative use for the relatively high Wi-Fi bandwidth, the commercial potential and the ease of roll out to a large customer base.

The prize itself isn’t a huge incentive – if you have an application that is genuinely useful, it will earn many times that amount – but it gives small developers the chance to catch BT’s eye, and BT some nice ideas on how to actually use the “Wireless Cities” wide area Wi-Fi networks that it is rolling out around the country now.