With Sony Ericsson's purchase of UIQ from Symbian, the wireless user interface, or UI, market got a lot clearer. Symbian was in the odd position of developing and licensing a UI that directly competed with that of its biggest operating system software customer and largest stakeholder, Nokia. The situation was hardly untenable — Nokia had substantial success selling and licensing its own Series 60 UI, while Symbian licensed UIQ to Sony Ericsson, BenQ and Motorola. But the relationship produced more than a few head scratches.

For Symbian's part, it has long said it would shed its UI efforts and focus solely on its OS — it just took six years to accomplish that goal. Now Symbian is devoted solely to its OS, and there are two distinct competitors producing Symbian UI's for the global market: Nokia's Series 60 and Sony Ericsson's UIQ. (Japanese vendors still use an alternate UI called MOAP.) And the remaining handset vendors seem to have fallen loosely into those two camps. Both Samsung and Motorola license Series 60, though they both do extensive work with Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform, a Symbian competitor. Motorola has dabbled with UIQ, Windows Mobile and even Linux.

According to Jerry Panagrossi, Symbian vice president of U.S. operations, the Sony Ericsson deal will change little of its day-to-day operations. Even when Symbian owned UIQ, it did not develop the UI and the OS concurrently. Instead it developed a UI abstraction layer, a reference design onto which both the Series 60 and UIQ graft, and it will continue to maintain that abstraction layer for Sony Ericsson, as well as Nokia. “A button is a button,” Panagrossi said. “It works the same way no matter what it looks like.”

But now that Symbian is out of the UI business, it might open more doors for the company's OS. The OS has garnered a lot more interest from the wireless industry recently. Just as handset vendors have started to move smartphones closer to the mass market — Nokia's new high-end consumer multimedia devices are built on Series 60, and Sony Ericsson just developed its first Walkman phone with UIQ — other companies want to move their UIs up that chain.

Independent UI developers such as UIEvolution and mPortal have been custom designing UIs for mobile virtual network operators, while Qualcomm has been installing UiOne into all manner of devices from basic CDMA phones to high-end UMTS phones. Qualcomm just announced its first GSM deal for its BREW platform with Telecom Italia Mobile, supporting a high-end 3-D gaming platform on its 3G phones, all running over UiOne. Although Qualcomm hasn't discussed the possibility of striking a deal with Symbian, the idea isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Before Qualcomm bought Trigenix in 2004 to create its UI, Trigenix was involved with Symbian to make its UI compatible with the Symbian OS, Panagrossi said.

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