Archived copy of A Swedish wolf in Norway

Ny Teknik writes that Sony Ericcson is to let 200 people go from their Uiq development facility in Ronneby, Sweden, after Nokia has announced that it is taking over Symbian and open sourcing it. This is interesting for Opera since it has been on Symbian for a long time, and the Uiq version has been integrated and sold with the handsets, unlike the Nokia Symbian Series 60 version which has mostly been a separate download and sold as shareware.

I used to like Uiq a lot back in the P800 days. I first saw a demo of it at Symbian in London back in 2000, and decided that it was exactly what I wanted, and the P800 did not disappoint. I now have a Sony Ericsson P990, but unfortunately the UI has been dumbed and slowed down significantly, and is nowhere near as nice as it was on the P800. The P990 wins on features, though.

I am considering a Sony Ericsson Xperia as my next mobile. It looks very sleek, I got to see a demo copy of it at the Elektrofil show in Oslo last weekend, but unfortunately it runs Windows CE. But if Uiq is cutting down on their staff, maybe that means that there will be no Uiq version as good as it was in the old P800, so this is the way to go forward?