The news last week of Motorola’s purchase of a 50% stake in UIQ from Sony Ericsson led me to wonder what this meant for the telecommunications company’s longer term strategy. After some discussions with all the parties involved, it’s becoming clear to me that this is a long term strategic move on the part of the Chicago company.

While Motorola were already licencees of both Symbian and UIQ, buying into the user interface layer (UIQ) that sits on top of the kernel and operating system (Symbian OS) allows them to inject both a significant amount of capital in to the development of UIQ, and to help shape its future direction – naturally shaping it towards something more useful for Motorola.

It should also, indirectly, help bolster the UIQ ecosystem, providing developers and programmers with the confidence that UIQ is a good long term bet for third party applications. With the Sony Ericsson UIQ based devices shipping with a number of third party developed applications in the firmware as full applications, and even more as ‘try and buy’ on the retail packaged CD, you would expect Motorola to follow the same methodology – and the easiest way to find ten high quality applications is to get one thousand apps developed and choose the top 1% of them.

Are we going to see an immediate upswing in the American market of UIQ devices? I think this is unlikely – the penetration of UIQ in the US market, not counting any grey imports, is zero. I don’t see the regular end-user is not going to walk into an American mobile store and ask for a UIQ powered device. The investment required in marketing a specific UIQ device would be very high, and it would only make sense if UIQ and Symbian OS was the easiest way to overcome a technological hurdle – if a RAZR like phone needs to have (for example) support for the Blackberry Connect services, then it’s likely that Motorola would consider UIQ early in the development process, but to roll out a UIQ device just for the sake of it is unlikely.

Where we might see a push in 2008 on a European based UIQ device from Motorola – the kicker/slider Z8 RIZR phone being a recent example of both a new UIQ3 device and one which strictly remained a European phone, although it was certified for US usage by the FCC – and building both on the lessons from that device, and the stronger presence of Symbian and UIQ compared to the US market.

What is clear is that the purchase of a stake in UIQ, and the joint statement from Mototola and Sony Ericsson is a very visible and very load declaration that the two companies are strong supporters of UIQ as a platform. With the dominance of Nokia’s S60, an alternative UI that also sits on top of Symbian OS, ensuring that UIQ remains in the minds of the developers and the networks was always going to be high on the list of priorities.

This announcement clearly does that. I await what follows with keen interest, and with more confidence on Motorola’s role than I had at the end of last week.