Decuma becomes first company to join UIQ Alliance Program

UIQ Technology today announced the new partnership program, UIQ Alliance, which is targeting a chosen set of companies providing applications or services, based on the UIQ user interface. The UIQ Alliance Partner Program provides an increased choice of UIQ compatible technologies and knowledge that will be introduced to UIQ customers.  “Members of the UIQ Alliance will possess diverse skills and experience, and deliver a variety of compelling technologies, products and services to the growing ecosystem built around UIQ,” says Johan Sandberg, CEO, UIQ Technology. “This will make it easier for mobile phone manufacturers to find good products and services supporting UIQ, which will be of high importance to the creation of a mass market for mobile phones based on UIQ”  

The first member to be chosen in the UIQ Alliance Partner Program is Decuma with their handwriting recognition software that currently covers Japanese and Chinese as well as western languages, a width not offered by anyone else in the market.

“The growing importance of fast and easy text input in advanced mobile phones is making handwriting recognition a central function”, says Charlotta Falvin, CEO of Decuma. ?We are very pleased to be invited to join the UIQ Alliance Partner Program as it increases our exposure to the UIQ community and will make it even easier for UIQ licensees to implement our technology?

Decuma offers Decuma Japanese, which handles the different writing styles used in Japanese: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, plus numbers and Latin characters. Decuma Chinese handles natural variations in Chinese writing: printed, semi-cursive and common cursive styles. Decuma OnSpot is a handwriting recognition software for US and European American characters. The software supports both single character and multi character input of non-cursive text. Current solutions are for mobile phones based on UIQ and Symbian OS.

UIQ Alliance partners can join the program by invitation only. Additional UIQ Alliance partners will soon be announced.

About UIQ Technology

UIQ Technology develops and licenses user interface platforms to the world’s leading mobile phone manufacturers and support licensees in the drive towards developing a mass market for open mobile phones. UIQ Technology, established 1999 in Ronneby, Sweden, is a fully owned subsidiary of Symbian Ltd. www.uiq.com

About UIQ
UIQ is a user interface platform for Symbian OS, especially designed for advanced, media rich mobile phones. UIQ is designed to offer easy access to the wide variety of data services in 2.5G and 3G networks. UIQ based phones are powerful and give access to enterprise applications, email, multimedia clips and web pages. Excellent interaction and graphical capabilities also provides support for advanced gaming possibilities. Currently there are 9 smartphones based on UIQ: Sony Ericsson P800, P900 and P910, Motorola A920, A925 and A1000, BenQ P30 and P31, Arima U300.

About Decuma
Decuma has developed its handwriting recognition software based upon its patented Geometrical Invariant Technology (GIT). With solutions for western languages, Japanese and Chinese, Decuma offers handwriting recognition software to end users as well as manufacturers of handheld devices. The company is located in Lund, Sweden and has local offices in Tokyo, Japan and Beijing, China. For more information, visit www.decuma.com or contact Charlotta Falvin at +46 702 555 696.

UIQ Technology will participate in 3GMobile Forum in Tokyo, Japan, 11-14 January 2005.

Media contacts:
Carina Dietmann
Marketing Communications Manager, UIQ Technology
Ph: +46 708 57 60 20

Charlotta Falvin
CEO, Decuma
Ph. +46 702 55 56 96

Hiromi Kameoka Blomberg (speaks Japanese)
Account Manager, Decuma
Ph: +46 709 59 63 17