Symbian Pulls Out Of UI Business, Doesn't Tell Anybody
The Register is speculating that Symbian is no longer including a UI with its smartphone OS based on some comments in another interview. The Reg points out that sperating the UI from the OS could lead to increased licensing costs which would not help anybody. But upon reading the eWeek article it seems more likely that Symbian is simply responding to carriers' demand to have more options to differentiate their products via the UI. Hopefully this means they want the ability for some branding and to bundle in their own apps. If however carriers and OS licensees intend to have completely different UIs that is not going to make life easy for application developers. This will in essence be a repeat of the WAP "walled garden" debacle. End users and application developers will demand the ability to install their own apps and customize the devices to their needs. Of course, as The Reg points out they haven't been able to reach Peter Bancroft of Symbian, who made the orginal statement, to clear this up yet.
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