Sony Ericsson Stops Developing Firmware for P990, W950, and M600

According to a posted email at the Sony Ericsson developer forums, this company has stopped firmware development for its P990, W950, and M600 Symbian UIQ mobile devices.

This announcement comes after the release of the P1 and announcement of the W960i models, and is seen by some as a means of stopping some of the bad press that these oft maligned devices have had for users.

According to the posted email:

These firmware releases meet the requirements of bug fixes prioritized by our operator customers and the Customer Services organization within different markets. The decision to freeze the P990, W950 and M600 firmware versions at this point has been made based on meeting these requirements. As with any phone project, no product is ever completely flawless. Any remaining issues are of course unfortunate, but we feel that with the level of quality on the latest P990 firmware we now have a good, solid product.

The P990 has recently received updates via firmware release R6D23 which brings it to the same level as the previous updates for the W950 and M600 devices.

According to parts of this posted email, some of the issues of stability with these devices seems to have been related to the hardware configuration, and the firmware releases to date have exploited as much performance as possible.

These devices do continue to be sold; however, the P990's replacement -- the P1 -- has already hit market availability in some markets, and the W950 and M600 replacements -- the W960i and M610i -- have been announced but are not yet for sale.

More about Symbian UIQ

UIQ is a software interface layer that sits on top of the Symbian operating system. Similar to the S60 layer, UIQ provides access to various system functions through a custom user interface.

Sony Ericsson purchased the entire UIQ division of Symbian from Nokia last year in an effort to better tune UIQ for its devices.

Currently, UIQ sits at version 3, with the P1 the latest device taking advantage of several performance and interface enhancements.

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Via Sony Ericsson Developer World