8 ms·

Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

31 points by SethMurphy 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago
The UI doesn't seem like any radical departure. Even the BB10 UI is probably more radical than that. I do like the fact that it's another open source Linux OS, but for now I'm rooting more for Firefox OS, even though it's yet to be seen if it will perform as well as Mozilla claims on low-end devices. But I've noticed Firefox OS has given Mozilla a lot of incentives to create new advanced HTML5 API's, and I like that. So the more they can keep up the Firefox OS project alive, the better.
Tichy 14y ago
Is it not possible to implement swipes on Android widgets?
- ok_craig 14y ago
  I know I can scroll the Calendar widget vertically. Don't know about horizontal for other widgets.
whalesalad 14y ago
No way. The UI is a gimmick. Watch the video. Seeing him use it does not lead me to believe this will make my life better at all. There are far too many intricate gestures and complex interactions. This UI does not solve any problems. The interactive tiles that are essentially miniature versions of the full app are just noisy. Part of the beauty of this new mobile experience that recent smartphones have cultivated is modal interaction. One app for one thing. I launch my music app and it's full screen with large touch buttons that are easy to use. I switch to another app to immerse myself in reading or responding to emails. I never need to do this from my homescreen, let alone see or interact with all of it at once. The ambient photo stuff is neat but also entirely useless. Nothing about this is radical. It's just a layer of more playful paint on yet another mobile platform. Why is everyone so fucking concerned with multitasking? My android-fanboy buddy showed me something the other day that made me chuckle. He says, "dude, look at this." He proceeded to load a video from the media library, and started to play it in some kind of picture-in-picture mode where it was floating above everything else on the phone. Then he tells me, "how cool is this?! you can use your phone while the video plays." my simple response, to which he had no answer: "when is that useful?" It's not! And he proceeded to admit that, albeit with his tail between his legs. I didn't say that to be an asshole, I just think that these days people are far too excited about gimmicks and useless customizations. He then went on to say something like "well what about if you want to watch a youtube video and also reply to some text messages?" ... society is doomed.
- whatshisface 14y ago
  >"when is that useful?" I would like to be able to listen to youtube music videos while doing other tasks.
  - pkulak 14y ago
    It doesn't work for Youtube. Only videos on the device. It's a joke.
  - daliusd 14y ago
    Then you will love BB10. At least you can do this on PlayBook therefore I believe BB10 will allow that as well.
- jasonkolb 14y ago
  "Why is everyone so fucking concerned with multitasking?" Some of us can do more than one thing at a time, some things I do require it. Don't be so myopic.
  - douglasisshiny 14y ago
    Actually, current scientific evidence says otherwise.
- viraptor 14y ago
  Actually I'd like it if I could respond to an incoming message over whatever app is running right now, without switching away. This would be useful for videos, games without a proper pause state saving, almost any application really. There's also the problem that comes up every other week for me: the phone number I want to call is in a picture / not selectable / selecting is completely broken due to some onmouseover handler. It still happens from time to time and I really wish I had an ability to see both apps (the one with the information and the dialer) at the same time. Video over other things seems less useful though... So yes, I'd like to see a little bit easier multitasking because not all apps/pages are properly taking advantage of the UI possibilities yet. And I'm talking about simple things like href=tel:...
ChrisClark 14y ago
Did they happen to take a look at the phone market in China? They think it's the only way to go, but unfortunately Android got there first. Open source and free. Everything is going Android there, their own app stores too. Unless they are releasing it for free too then I doubt they will overtake Android in China.
- gbraad 14y ago
  Yes, Android is the first mover in the market and also iOS is quite dominant in the rich areas (BeiShangGuangShen). It is the toughest market to deal with, even with the help of D.Phone... why? They would have to compete with local brands like Meizu and Xiaomi (Android) which release good quality for an affordable price. I expect Jolla wants to aim for the richer group of people, like Vertu does(/did)... but these does not shop at D.Phone...
herval 14y ago
No. There's a lot of options on the mobile space already (iOS, Android and WM8) - which, IMHO is enough (not to mention BB, FirefoxOS, WebOS, Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia)...
- bergie 14y ago
  I don't think the prize for the 3rd place has been given out yet. Possible contenders are BlackBerry, Bada, and WP. Symbian still sells ok-ish, but is clearly a dead end. And then there are some new players including Tizen, Sailfish, and Firefox OS. Personally, I'd like to see a properly open alternative do well. Firefox OS would be the best for the web, and Sailfish for Linux in general.
  - herval 14y ago
    Thanks for remembering Bada :-) I totally agree there's still a sort of draw for who the third one will be, but I think it's quickly converging towards WP8 due mainly to Nokia's bet on it...
  - gbraad 14y ago
    > Firefox OS would be the best for the web, and Sailfish for Linux in general. Agree to this... users do not care about Linux and often has a negative feel among the masses in China; the try to be Windows when you can get the real stuff for 'free'. They care more about access to service and being able to do the same as their friends/colleagues, play games, access to 微信 (weixin, wechat), 微博 (weibo), etc. For this the compatibility layer might come in handy, since without it is hard to find the users. Note: Blackberry and Bada are not really contenders in China. WP maybe, but purely due to the looks of the phone (eg Lumia), but was faced with no store access in China for a long time.
- rurounijones 14y ago
  "Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia" is dead, it was killed by Elop. Sailfish (The software being demo'd) is created by a group of ex "Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia" devs and is based on that codebase - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS
readme 14y ago
It's meego.
- bergie 14y ago
  Well, actually Mer, the MeeGo spin-off http://merproject.org/ http://merproject.org/ Some background on this whole Maemo/MeeGo/Sailfish story http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/
Spherical 14y ago
They aim to crack China and their reasoning is that the big players haven't got a foothold yet due to being a young-ish market. At the same time they are looking to developers to create native apps for it and hardly anyone is going to develop for a phone if their primary market is China where 99.9% people steal.
- goldfeld 14y ago
  "China where 99.9% people steal." That's a pretty sweeping statement not to be backed by a source with a figure even remotely resembling 99.9%.
  - Spherical 14y ago
    Source: A friend IOS App collecting analytics data. Sure, I could make it up but that is the data he got back.
    - Volpe 14y ago
      Right and 99.9% of chinese run iOS... A more likely answer is you are just Racist.
      - Spherical 14y ago
        I should have been more clear, so let me correct that for you, of 99.9% of those that owned IOS and that downloaded his app - they did not pay for it. For the record it got 4.5 stars with over 800 reviews so it not by all means crap. That is the figure I was given. Given we were talking about mobile, I was using that as my guide for a platform not yet on the market. China has some of the highest piracy rates in the world—with a piracy rate of 96% in PC software, 93% in motion pictures, and 85% in records and music. [“China Fever” F. Fang 2007, International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) report, Feb. 18. 2010 ] http://www.china-mike.com/facts-about-china/economy-investment-business-statistics/ http://www.china-mike.com/facts-about-china/economy-investme...
general_failure 14y ago
The UI is pathetic. Why are people so bent on such complex gestures? Scroll up for this, scroll down for that, two finger slide up for another thing. Seriously? xemacs has a cult following and so will sailfish. But you know how xemacs will do in the "market".
ricardobeat 14y ago
That demo video is terrible. If it really has anything new in it's UI, that guy failed miserably at demonstrating it. Changing the background/ambience is one of the pillars of a "more personal user experience", really? I'd like to understand why this Quartz guy is jizzing all over this company, but the article doesn't help either.
- trolloss 14y ago
  > I'd like to understand why this Quartz guy is jizzing all over this company Probably been promised a free phone: wait until he gets an old N9 as demo phone without DIY flash instructions.
jasonkolb 14y ago
In contrast to others here I actually kind of liked it. I really dug the idea of making app icons interactive and useful, it's an intelligent use of limited real estate. Also, I'm not sure if it's just novelty or actually more intuitive, but I really liked how the icon grid scrolls vertically rather than horizontally. Maybe it's because of the aspect ratio of mobile screens but it just looked more intuitive to my eye.
elteto 14y ago
"...a real alternative to iPhone and Android" There is something about this title that just incites a negative reaction from me. To me, it implies that the current available options are broken beyond repair and that a "savior" is coming to liberate us from them, and boy... do I hate self-proclaimed saviors, especially in the tech area. Android/iPhone/WP7/Mozilla OS/$xyz are the options we have, and we don't need a real alternative to them anymore than we need anything else. New mobile OS coming up? Great, competition benefits me, the end user, since my devices just keep getting better. But please don't pretend to be something that you are not.
- daliusd 14y ago
  I guess headlines was written by journalist anyway. Actually you try to read more from headline than it actually states.
nimdahk 14y ago
So... the big innovation here is "widgets." Something that android has had for years.
cmccabe 14y ago
Some day, we'll look back on the days of a mobile OS being announced every few months and chuckle. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-01-13/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-01-13/
jarcoal 14y ago
I really think these tile widgets are not useful or easy to understand for an average user. Apple has it right: iOS is just an app launcher, and there is just one tier of apps, none of this widget-y stuff. I will note that small read-only changes can be beneficial to the user (calendar shows current day in icon), but I wouldn't dare make someone try and interact with that.
- daliusd 14y ago
  Well, why everyone should please "average user"? http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2012/07/21/finlands-jolla-will-be-the-ferrari-of-the-smartphone-world/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2012/07/21/finlands-j...
pratfall 14y ago
This is off topic, but if your website requires Javascript for me to read a text article, fuck you.
ixobelle 14y ago
The ui looks terrible. Basically android, with left and right swipe widgets, and this is somehow revolutionary. Yawn
film42 14y ago
Even if someone considers this a 'better' UI than iOS or Android (I personally don't), there's no point in switching because as soon as you do, that $200+ you've spent over the last 4 years on apps is gone forever and you'll only get less quality software as their replacement (if they exist). Apple and Android don't just shoot for a 'sexy' look, they create thousands of docs and demos from their SDK for the developers who then create hundreds of thousands of tutorials to help other developers learn quicker. They then spend millions of dollars and millions of hours creating the next big thing. The successes of iOS and Android are not awarded to a design firm, they are given to us.. the developer ecosystem and for that reason, this will never be a real alternative... at least not for a long time.
halostatue 14y ago
Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless. 1. They have no production as of yet. 2. They have no carrier partners as of yet. 3. They have a retail partner who will sell the phones—if the carriers approve them. The claim is that the retail partners control the mobile relationship with the carriers in China, but that would greatly surprise me. It's not impossible, but colour me skeptical. It's also my understanding that Europeans don't necessarily get subsidized phones, either—but they still (nominally) control which phones are allowed on their networks. It gets worse later in the article where it suggests that the carriers and handset manufacturers are going to have even more freedom to modify the base OS than Android manufacturers do. This alone guarantees that Sailfish will not be a viable platform—you will become as locked into a single manufacturer for any app you buy just like you did with "feature" phones that had BREW or JME games & apps. The suggestion that Sailfish avoids patent infringement is also laughable: there's so many patents out there that I suspect that absolutely no one can write software that doesn't infringe on something these days. They think that they've avoided patent infringement (just as Google does with WebM), but until someone decides to sue over an alleged patent infringement, no one knows whether Jolla would win. There's an interesting bit buried in the story, too: they have changed CEOs at least once. The current CEO is Marc Dillon; he attained that post in October when Jussi Hurmola stepped down and became a consultant to the company. Hurmola is supposedly looking after the Sailfish ecosystem. According to what I saw on LinkedIn, Hurmola may have only had the CEO position for as little as eight months, but possibly as much as eighteen (Jolla was founded in March 2011). For a startup with big ambitions, I would want as much stability at the top as possible, personally.
- daliusd 14y ago
  Where do you collect your facts? I'm not even sure if you don't have bad intentions with your comment. It would be nice from your side to state your relation to Jolla (e.g. competitor) 1. Headline was written by journalist not by Jolla. OK I got it wrong. You are negative to journalist, right? 2. You are most probably right about production but you simply don't know. You are wrong about carrier partners: they have one in Finland (http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/11/21/jolla-signs-first-carrier-deal-with-finlands-dna-to-carry-upcoming-sailfish-powered-phones/ http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/11/21/jolla-signs-first-ca...) and one in China. 2. Europeans can get subsidized phones but don't have to. You can use any phone if you manage to get one. I even used one phone that is not for production just fine (N950). 3. I doubt that lock is an issue here. You basically can reflash your phone with pure OS if you want to - like you can reflash your N9 with Mer now. 4. I almost agree with you regarding patents but idea is that Jolla has its own patent portfolio gifted to them by Nokia. 5. Hurmola according to LinkedIn still works for Jolla. As well they are not hiding why CEO was changed - they are quite transparent regarding that. Sorry, but don't find that now. I'm not related to Jolla in any way. I'm (mobile) developer who believes that Jolla will succeed.

31 points by SethMurphy 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago

The UI doesn't seem like any radical departure. Even the BB10 UI is probably more radical than that. I do like the fact that it's another open source Linux OS, but for now I'm rooting more for Firefox OS, even though it's yet to be seen if it will perform as well as Mozilla claims on low-end devices. But I've noticed Firefox OS has given Mozilla a lot of incentives to create new advanced HTML5 API's, and I like that. So the more they can keep up the Firefox OS project alive, the better.

Tichy 14y ago

Is it not possible to implement swipes on Android widgets?

ok_craig 14y ago
I know I can scroll the Calendar widget vertically. Don't know about horizontal for other widgets.

whalesalad 14y ago

No way. The UI is a gimmick. Watch the video. Seeing him use it does not lead me to believe this will make my life better at all. There are far too many intricate gestures and complex interactions. This UI does not solve any problems. The interactive tiles that are essentially miniature versions of the full app are just noisy. Part of the beauty of this new mobile experience that recent smartphones have cultivated is modal interaction. One app for one thing. I launch my music app and it's full screen with large touch buttons that are easy to use. I switch to another app to immerse myself in reading or responding to emails. I never need to do this from my homescreen, let alone see or interact with all of it at once. The ambient photo stuff is neat but also entirely useless. Nothing about this is radical. It's just a layer of more playful paint on yet another mobile platform. Why is everyone so fucking concerned with multitasking? My android-fanboy buddy showed me something the other day that made me chuckle. He says, "dude, look at this." He proceeded to load a video from the media library, and started to play it in some kind of picture-in-picture mode where it was floating above everything else on the phone. Then he tells me, "how cool is this?! you can use your phone while the video plays." my simple response, to which he had no answer: "when is that useful?" It's not! And he proceeded to admit that, albeit with his tail between his legs. I didn't say that to be an asshole, I just think that these days people are far too excited about gimmicks and useless customizations. He then went on to say something like "well what about if you want to watch a youtube video and also reply to some text messages?" ... society is doomed.

whatshisface 14y ago
>"when is that useful?" I would like to be able to listen to youtube music videos while doing other tasks.
- pkulak 14y ago
  It doesn't work for Youtube. Only videos on the device. It's a joke.
- daliusd 14y ago
  Then you will love BB10. At least you can do this on PlayBook therefore I believe BB10 will allow that as well.
jasonkolb 14y ago
"Why is everyone so fucking concerned with multitasking?" Some of us can do more than one thing at a time, some things I do require it. Don't be so myopic.
- douglasisshiny 14y ago
  Actually, current scientific evidence says otherwise.
viraptor 14y ago
Actually I'd like it if I could respond to an incoming message over whatever app is running right now, without switching away. This would be useful for videos, games without a proper pause state saving, almost any application really. There's also the problem that comes up every other week for me: the phone number I want to call is in a picture / not selectable / selecting is completely broken due to some onmouseover handler. It still happens from time to time and I really wish I had an ability to see both apps (the one with the information and the dialer) at the same time. Video over other things seems less useful though... So yes, I'd like to see a little bit easier multitasking because not all apps/pages are properly taking advantage of the UI possibilities yet. And I'm talking about simple things like href=tel:...

ChrisClark 14y ago

Did they happen to take a look at the phone market in China? They think it's the only way to go, but unfortunately Android got there first. Open source and free. Everything is going Android there, their own app stores too. Unless they are releasing it for free too then I doubt they will overtake Android in China.

gbraad 14y ago
Yes, Android is the first mover in the market and also iOS is quite dominant in the rich areas (BeiShangGuangShen). It is the toughest market to deal with, even with the help of D.Phone... why? They would have to compete with local brands like Meizu and Xiaomi (Android) which release good quality for an affordable price. I expect Jolla wants to aim for the richer group of people, like Vertu does(/did)... but these does not shop at D.Phone...

herval 14y ago

No. There's a lot of options on the mobile space already (iOS, Android and WM8) - which, IMHO is enough (not to mention BB, FirefoxOS, WebOS, Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia)...

bergie 14y ago
I don't think the prize for the 3rd place has been given out yet. Possible contenders are BlackBerry, Bada, and WP. Symbian still sells ok-ish, but is clearly a dead end. And then there are some new players including Tizen, Sailfish, and Firefox OS. Personally, I'd like to see a properly open alternative do well. Firefox OS would be the best for the web, and Sailfish for Linux in general.
- herval 14y ago
  Thanks for remembering Bada :-) I totally agree there's still a sort of draw for who the third one will be, but I think it's quickly converging towards WP8 due mainly to Nokia's bet on it...
- gbraad 14y ago
  > Firefox OS would be the best for the web, and Sailfish for Linux in general. Agree to this... users do not care about Linux and often has a negative feel among the masses in China; the try to be Windows when you can get the real stuff for 'free'. They care more about access to service and being able to do the same as their friends/colleagues, play games, access to 微信 (weixin, wechat), 微博 (weibo), etc. For this the compatibility layer might come in handy, since without it is hard to find the users. Note: Blackberry and Bada are not really contenders in China. WP maybe, but purely due to the looks of the phone (eg Lumia), but was faced with no store access in China for a long time.
rurounijones 14y ago
"Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia" is dead, it was killed by Elop. Sailfish (The software being demo'd) is created by a group of ex "Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia" devs and is based on that codebase - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS

readme 14y ago

It's meego.

bergie 14y ago
Well, actually Mer, the MeeGo spin-off http://merproject.org/ http://merproject.org/ Some background on this whole Maemo/MeeGo/Sailfish story http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/

Spherical 14y ago

They aim to crack China and their reasoning is that the big players haven't got a foothold yet due to being a young-ish market. At the same time they are looking to developers to create native apps for it and hardly anyone is going to develop for a phone if their primary market is China where 99.9% people steal.

goldfeld 14y ago
"China where 99.9% people steal." That's a pretty sweeping statement not to be backed by a source with a figure even remotely resembling 99.9%.
- Spherical 14y ago
  Source: A friend IOS App collecting analytics data. Sure, I could make it up but that is the data he got back.
  - Volpe 14y ago
    Right and 99.9% of chinese run iOS... A more likely answer is you are just Racist.
    - Spherical 14y ago
      I should have been more clear, so let me correct that for you, of 99.9% of those that owned IOS and that downloaded his app - they did not pay for it. For the record it got 4.5 stars with over 800 reviews so it not by all means crap. That is the figure I was given. Given we were talking about mobile, I was using that as my guide for a platform not yet on the market. China has some of the highest piracy rates in the world—with a piracy rate of 96% in PC software, 93% in motion pictures, and 85% in records and music. [“China Fever” F. Fang 2007, International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) report, Feb. 18. 2010 ] http://www.china-mike.com/facts-about-china/economy-investment-business-statistics/ http://www.china-mike.com/facts-about-china/economy-investme...

general_failure 14y ago

The UI is pathetic. Why are people so bent on such complex gestures? Scroll up for this, scroll down for that, two finger slide up for another thing. Seriously? xemacs has a cult following and so will sailfish. But you know how xemacs will do in the "market".

ricardobeat 14y ago

That demo video is terrible. If it really has anything new in it's UI, that guy failed miserably at demonstrating it. Changing the background/ambience is one of the pillars of a "more personal user experience", really? I'd like to understand why this Quartz guy is jizzing all over this company, but the article doesn't help either.

trolloss 14y ago
> I'd like to understand why this Quartz guy is jizzing all over this company Probably been promised a free phone: wait until he gets an old N9 as demo phone without DIY flash instructions.

jasonkolb 14y ago

In contrast to others here I actually kind of liked it. I really dug the idea of making app icons interactive and useful, it's an intelligent use of limited real estate. Also, I'm not sure if it's just novelty or actually more intuitive, but I really liked how the icon grid scrolls vertically rather than horizontally. Maybe it's because of the aspect ratio of mobile screens but it just looked more intuitive to my eye.

elteto 14y ago

"...a real alternative to iPhone and Android" There is something about this title that just incites a negative reaction from me. To me, it implies that the current available options are broken beyond repair and that a "savior" is coming to liberate us from them, and boy... do I hate self-proclaimed saviors, especially in the tech area. Android/iPhone/WP7/Mozilla OS/$xyz are the options we have, and we don't need a real alternative to them anymore than we need anything else. New mobile OS coming up? Great, competition benefits me, the end user, since my devices just keep getting better. But please don't pretend to be something that you are not.

daliusd 14y ago
I guess headlines was written by journalist anyway. Actually you try to read more from headline than it actually states.

nimdahk 14y ago

So... the big innovation here is "widgets." Something that android has had for years.

cmccabe 14y ago

Some day, we'll look back on the days of a mobile OS being announced every few months and chuckle. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-01-13/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-01-13/

jarcoal 14y ago

I really think these tile widgets are not useful or easy to understand for an average user. Apple has it right: iOS is just an app launcher, and there is just one tier of apps, none of this widget-y stuff. I will note that small read-only changes can be beneficial to the user (calendar shows current day in icon), but I wouldn't dare make someone try and interact with that.

daliusd 14y ago
Well, why everyone should please "average user"? http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2012/07/21/finlands-jolla-will-be-the-ferrari-of-the-smartphone-world/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2012/07/21/finlands-j...

pratfall 14y ago

This is off topic, but if your website requires Javascript for me to read a text article, fuck you.

ixobelle 14y ago

The ui looks terrible. Basically android, with left and right swipe widgets, and this is somehow revolutionary. Yawn

film42 14y ago

Even if someone considers this a 'better' UI than iOS or Android (I personally don't), there's no point in switching because as soon as you do, that $200+ you've spent over the last 4 years on apps is gone forever and you'll only get less quality software as their replacement (if they exist). Apple and Android don't just shoot for a 'sexy' look, they create thousands of docs and demos from their SDK for the developers who then create hundreds of thousands of tutorials to help other developers learn quicker. They then spend millions of dollars and millions of hours creating the next big thing. The successes of iOS and Android are not awarded to a design firm, they are given to us.. the developer ecosystem and for that reason, this will never be a real alternative... at least not for a long time.

halostatue 14y ago

Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless. 1. They have no production as of yet. 2. They have no carrier partners as of yet. 3. They have a retail partner who will sell the phones—if the carriers approve them. The claim is that the retail partners control the mobile relationship with the carriers in China, but that would greatly surprise me. It's not impossible, but colour me skeptical. It's also my understanding that Europeans don't necessarily get subsidized phones, either—but they still (nominally) control which phones are allowed on their networks. It gets worse later in the article where it suggests that the carriers and handset manufacturers are going to have even more freedom to modify the base OS than Android manufacturers do. This alone guarantees that Sailfish will not be a viable platform—you will become as locked into a single manufacturer for any app you buy just like you did with "feature" phones that had BREW or JME games & apps. The suggestion that Sailfish avoids patent infringement is also laughable: there's so many patents out there that I suspect that absolutely no one can write software that doesn't infringe on something these days. They think that they've avoided patent infringement (just as Google does with WebM), but until someone decides to sue over an alleged patent infringement, no one knows whether Jolla would win. There's an interesting bit buried in the story, too: they have changed CEOs at least once. The current CEO is Marc Dillon; he attained that post in October when Jussi Hurmola stepped down and became a consultant to the company. Hurmola is supposedly looking after the Sailfish ecosystem. According to what I saw on LinkedIn, Hurmola may have only had the CEO position for as little as eight months, but possibly as much as eighteen (Jolla was founded in March 2011). For a startup with big ambitions, I would want as much stability at the top as possible, personally.

daliusd 14y ago
Where do you collect your facts? I'm not even sure if you don't have bad intentions with your comment. It would be nice from your side to state your relation to Jolla (e.g. competitor) 1. Headline was written by journalist not by Jolla. OK I got it wrong. You are negative to journalist, right? 2. You are most probably right about production but you simply don't know. You are wrong about carrier partners: they have one in Finland (http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/11/21/jolla-signs-first-carrier-deal-with-finlands-dna-to-carry-upcoming-sailfish-powered-phones/ http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/11/21/jolla-signs-first-ca...) and one in China. 2. Europeans can get subsidized phones but don't have to. You can use any phone if you manage to get one. I even used one phone that is not for production just fine (N950). 3. I doubt that lock is an issue here. You basically can reflash your phone with pure OS if you want to - like you can reflash your N9 with Mer now. 4. I almost agree with you regarding patents but idea is that Jolla has its own patent portfolio gifted to them by Nokia. 5. Hurmola according to LinkedIn still works for Jolla. As well they are not hiding why CEO was changed - they are quite transparent regarding that. Sorry, but don't find that now. I'm not related to Jolla in any way. I'm (mobile) developer who believes that Jolla will succeed.