Sony Ericsson and Motorola today announced an agreement under which Sony Ericsson will sell 50% of UIQ Technology to Motorola - and the two companies will, going forward, work together on the development of the UIQ open user interface platform.

"UIQ Technology licenses the UIQ open User Interface and development platform to mobile phone vendors worldwide," writes WirelessWeek's Teresa von Fuchs. "Motorola and Sony Ericsson have agreed that UIQ will be vendor and chipset independent, that it will be licensed on equal terms to all mobile device vendors and that they both hope to expand the shareholder base of UI Holdings to include other handset vendors."

"One interesting thing of note is that UIQ is the power behind Sony Ericsson's touchscreen devices," writes InformationWeek's Eric Zeman. "As we all know, touch screens are on the verge of becoming the new handset design rage. For Motorola to buy into this technology could help it develop touchscreen-based devices, which it has openly said it is working on, to market."

More here from the AP ... more here from Reuters ... more here from IntoMobile ... more here from SmartPhoneToday ... more here from Computerworld ... more here from Gizmodo ... and the press release is here.