Unlike others

Within the Symbian consortium Motorola and Ericsson (later a joint venture Sony Ericsson) took another route, creating a user interface for Symbian OS that resembles PDAs. Sure, a UIQ communicator could operate in cellular networks like a normal feature phone, or a smartphone, the emerging apex predator of the market. However, it allowed much more than a keypad-driven user interface could ever offer. The road for UIQ was quite bumpy with Motorola leaving the consortium in 2003 and re-entering three years later, just to witness the very end of this operating system flavour. Nevertheless, it left a memorable trace with lots of capable and very peculiar devices.