Mobile app developer Quickoffice has licensed a version of its Quickoffice Premier product to Nokia to enable the Microsoft Office suite on its Symbian OS-based Series 60 phones, and is demonstrating another version for Symbian’s UIQ 3 user interface at The Symbian Smartphone Show in London.
The Dallas, Texas-based ISV started life as an enabler of Office apps on Palm devices, but as that market has hit a plateau it has diversified onto the Symbian OS and its various user interfaces.
The deal with Nokia means other licensees of the Nokia user interface, such as Samsung, Panasonic and Siemens, can offer Office apps on their Symbian phones, while the UIQ version extends that facility to Sony Ericsson, Motorola and BenQ.
The BenQ/Siemens situation, in which a UIQ licensee acquired a S60 user, has yet to be resolved, according to Symbian sources, but either way the Quickoffice technology will be relevant.
These are significant developments for the future of both Symbian, which is owned a consortium of handset manufacturers led by Nokia, and Windows Mobile 5.0.
After all, Microsoft, which is coming from behind in the mobile device market, has traditionally argued that the use of its OS guaranteed the best performance of its apps, but the Quickoffice technology tends to remove those bragging rights.
This is a further example of part of Microsoft that is a major generator of revenue, i.e. the Office Suite division, getting fed up waiting for the unprofitable Windows Mobile part, going out and guaranteeing its presence on as many mobile devices as possible, argued a source at Symbian.
He pointed to an earlier example this year, in which the Exchange division licensed its ActiveSync technology to Symbian to enable Exchange email traffic to be synched with phones running the OS, even though this removed a reason for handset manufacturers to go with Windows Mobile.
Simon Garth, VP of marketing at Cambridge, UK-based Symbian, noted that, by way of a further irony, the push email capability being announced for Service Pack 3 of Exchange 2003 is already available in the ActiveSync-enabled RoadSync client for Symbian phones from DataViz, another mobile app developer.
In other words, the first push email client for Exchange is available on Symbian, not Windows Mobile, he said.