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I was using a dumb phone and a change of life made me need a smartphone. A friend of mine encouraged me to get a Jolla. I liked the idea, Open Source, you can

I was using a dumb phone and a change of life made me need a smartphone. A friend of mine encouraged me to get a Jolla. I liked the idea, Open Source, you can code your app in Python, compatible with Android apps, etc. At the begining, I was very tolerant with the quirks of the phone, being a FOSS believer and all. But after months and months of use, I'm getting more and more frustrated with it: - it's slow. - apps randomly crashes or don't start at all. - Android support is limited. - network is unreliable. - the performances don't allow any decent Web surf experience, and I already hate the Web on mobile so it makes things irritating for me. - it requires a lot of fiddling to adapt it to your needs. It can be good if you need customization, but some basic stuff (such as emoji) are not included by default. Some might consider that a feature, but when a girl text me a smiley when I flirt with her, I want to know what face it has because it kinda condition my next answer. - some bugs are incredibly annoying. The worst being the poor handling of group text messages which lead to very confusing conversations. A smartphone that can't text, really? - ergonomy is lacking at best. While I think there are some neat ideas, the hidden menu for simple tasks, the absence of resize in some picture mode and the presence of it in others and plenty other subtle details make it cumbersome to use even for basic stuff. The color scheme and overall design is not a good fit on the long run. I do like having a real GNU system and a terminal to play with it on my phone, but let's face it, I use the Web/GPS/Text more than the terminal, and they are not decent for a 2016 experience. It's where smarphones were 5 years ago, but with bugs. I don't regret I bought it, it was a nice experience, but now I'm going for something that will just work.

trm42 10y ago
Well what did you expect if you bought a phone made in 2013 and which was low-end phone with mid-level price even at that time (costed about 400 € and felt like a 200€ smart phone). Nowadays it's either Android or iPhone. Pick your poison. The specs for Jolla C are quite limited, but maybe with their OS those specs are enough. At least now they gotten better display panel (IPS) because the one of the biggest fails the first Jolla phone had, was the display. Jolla C looks like it's priced at zero-margin. They just want to have lots of developers at this point. And the 169 € sounds a lot better than 400€
maheart 10y ago
Out of interest, how recent is your experience? SailfishOS has come a long way. I'm using SailfishOS 2.0, and a lot of the shortcomings (e.g. speed, crashing) have been resolved.
- sametmax 10y ago
  I've bought the phone last years, but I kepts it up to date. Now I'm on 2.0.1. It's way better, but all the previous points still hold. Surfing, espacially, is painful experience with slow loading and misclicks everywhere. Group text won't tell you who is answering to you and you can't select a message to respond to it only. Yesterday the phone went from 4G to 2G for no reason then shut down.
  - chappi42 10y ago
    They are too small. I also have such 'pain-points', e.g. the notes with CardDAV/Fastmail are not synchronized. Wtf, such a basic requirement. But realistically they cannot match Andorid/iPhone, it's kind of a wonder how far they got.
martinsb 10y ago
To add some (ar least for me) irritating issues: - frequently restarts for no apparent reason, - no global copy and paste. I was hoping that would be implemented in 2.0, and I was very disappointed it had not. Although now I have switched to an Android phone, I wish Jolla best of luck. Hope to try their products in future.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  > - frequently restarts for no apparent reason, Would not surprise me if that is related to their use of systemd.
- mpol 10y ago
  "frequently restarts for no apparent reason," Doesn't happen to me. Not argueing one way or another, just stating a different experience. I once had a Sony Xperia, bought the same model as my then-girlfriend, from the same company, probably the same batch. She had often spontaneous reboots, but I never had. She complained quite much about that and would never buy a Sony smartphone again.
pekk 10y ago
That's really, really strange. I don't find any of these problems to be true. Not one of them. I don't know how this could be. I can't agree that this is where phones were 5 years ago.
fractallyte 10y ago
I got my phone (probably one of the last) in February. I can't agree with any of your points - not a single one! This Jolla phone is superb: fast (including web browsing), reliable, easy to use, with support for all the Android apps I'm interested in. My only complaint is that the software (Sailfish OS) is let down by the hardware. I wish Jolla had been brave enough to gamble with the Mirasol display; too late now, since Apple's acquired the tech (and will probably do awesome things with it). With my bluetooth keyboard, I'm happy playing with emacs (Slime and SBCL), and hopefully soon Erlang - all through a native terminal. For lightning fast web browsing, I use Links2. I certainly can't do any of this on an Apple device, and Android - is it possible? I'll never know - I'm spoilt with my Jolla.
- ewzimm 10y ago
  I'm curious about what's compelling about having a native terminal. When I first started with Android, I really enjoyed using the terminal, creating chroots, installing and configuring things. I learned a lot. But now that I have several cheap servers on DigitalOcean, I have almost no interest in native terminal. The interface is the same, everything works properly with no quirks, I can scale up the power as much as I want, and I can access it from a desktop to pick up where I left off. The only use case I can think of would be wanting to access a terminal on the phone when I don't have a network connection, but so far that has never come up. I'm not saying it isn't nice to have a native terminal, just that renting a VPS to me is so much better to mein every way. I can definitely see the case for people on a very tight budget or with poor connectivity, but is there any other reason? Not trying to contradict you, just really can't think of a reason why I'd want to go back.
  - fractallyte 10y ago
    A smartphone is a pocket computer with a suite of communications and networking tools. Imagine being able to use something like Rebol - which makes it easy to send emails with simple commands - but updated for GSM/SMS/etc. There are immense possibilities for useful software, all starting with a terminal, but which can be built into full graphical applications. A hacker's delight! (BTW, this post is being written on a Jolla phone)

trm42 10y ago

Well what did you expect if you bought a phone made in 2013 and which was low-end phone with mid-level price even at that time (costed about 400 € and felt like a 200€ smart phone). Nowadays it's either Android or iPhone. Pick your poison. The specs for Jolla C are quite limited, but maybe with their OS those specs are enough. At least now they gotten better display panel (IPS) because the one of the biggest fails the first Jolla phone had, was the display. Jolla C looks like it's priced at zero-margin. They just want to have lots of developers at this point. And the 169 € sounds a lot better than 400€

maheart 10y ago

Out of interest, how recent is your experience? SailfishOS has come a long way. I'm using SailfishOS 2.0, and a lot of the shortcomings (e.g. speed, crashing) have been resolved.

sametmax 10y ago
I've bought the phone last years, but I kepts it up to date. Now I'm on 2.0.1. It's way better, but all the previous points still hold. Surfing, espacially, is painful experience with slow loading and misclicks everywhere. Group text won't tell you who is answering to you and you can't select a message to respond to it only. Yesterday the phone went from 4G to 2G for no reason then shut down.
- chappi42 10y ago
  They are too small. I also have such 'pain-points', e.g. the notes with CardDAV/Fastmail are not synchronized. Wtf, such a basic requirement. But realistically they cannot match Andorid/iPhone, it's kind of a wonder how far they got.

martinsb 10y ago

To add some (ar least for me) irritating issues: - frequently restarts for no apparent reason, - no global copy and paste. I was hoping that would be implemented in 2.0, and I was very disappointed it had not. Although now I have switched to an Android phone, I wish Jolla best of luck. Hope to try their products in future.

digi_owl 10y ago
> - frequently restarts for no apparent reason, Would not surprise me if that is related to their use of systemd.
mpol 10y ago
"frequently restarts for no apparent reason," Doesn't happen to me. Not argueing one way or another, just stating a different experience. I once had a Sony Xperia, bought the same model as my then-girlfriend, from the same company, probably the same batch. She had often spontaneous reboots, but I never had. She complained quite much about that and would never buy a Sony smartphone again.

pekk 10y ago

That's really, really strange. I don't find any of these problems to be true. Not one of them. I don't know how this could be. I can't agree that this is where phones were 5 years ago.

fractallyte 10y ago

I got my phone (probably one of the last) in February. I can't agree with any of your points - not a single one! This Jolla phone is superb: fast (including web browsing), reliable, easy to use, with support for all the Android apps I'm interested in. My only complaint is that the software (Sailfish OS) is let down by the hardware. I wish Jolla had been brave enough to gamble with the Mirasol display; too late now, since Apple's acquired the tech (and will probably do awesome things with it). With my bluetooth keyboard, I'm happy playing with emacs (Slime and SBCL), and hopefully soon Erlang - all through a native terminal. For lightning fast web browsing, I use Links2. I certainly can't do any of this on an Apple device, and Android - is it possible? I'll never know - I'm spoilt with my Jolla.

ewzimm 10y ago
I'm curious about what's compelling about having a native terminal. When I first started with Android, I really enjoyed using the terminal, creating chroots, installing and configuring things. I learned a lot. But now that I have several cheap servers on DigitalOcean, I have almost no interest in native terminal. The interface is the same, everything works properly with no quirks, I can scale up the power as much as I want, and I can access it from a desktop to pick up where I left off. The only use case I can think of would be wanting to access a terminal on the phone when I don't have a network connection, but so far that has never come up. I'm not saying it isn't nice to have a native terminal, just that renting a VPS to me is so much better to mein every way. I can definitely see the case for people on a very tight budget or with poor connectivity, but is there any other reason? Not trying to contradict you, just really can't think of a reason why I'd want to go back.
- fractallyte 10y ago
  A smartphone is a pocket computer with a suite of communications and networking tools. Imagine being able to use something like Rebol - which makes it easy to send emails with simple commands - but updated for GSM/SMS/etc. There are immense possibilities for useful software, all starting with a terminal, but which can be built into full graphical applications. A hacker's delight! (BTW, this post is being written on a Jolla phone)