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For the people who are genuinely confused, Jolla is a company that sells smartphones, their first smartphone is also called Jolla; it runs Sailfish OS, which is
by Brakenshire 13y ago
For the people who are genuinely confused, Jolla is a company that sells smartphones, their first smartphone is also called Jolla; it runs Sailfish OS, which is effectively a fork of the Meego operating system which Nokia used in its N9/N900 phones, before they switched to Windows Mobile. This is not very surprising, because Jolla is a Finnish company principally made up of ex-Nokia engineers, including a lot of the people who created the N9 in the first place. Sailfish OS stays closer to Linux than Android, using Wayland, Qt/QML, PulseAudio etc, and adhering to the Linux Standard Base specification. It also comes packaged with an Android runtime based on Alien Dalvik, so that it can run Android applications (similar to Blackberry 10), although it won't have access to Google Play or the Play Services APIs. The phone is being launched this week in Finland, and there are plans for release in the rest of Europe, and in China, though not so far in the US.
Edit: Some more technical details about the OS: https://sailfishos.org/about-technology.html https://sailfishos.org/about-technology.html
- msvan 13y agoHow refreshing it is with a tech product that doesn't launch in the US first! I'm quite happy that there are more non-US non-China competitors popping up in the mobile market.
- Brakenshire 13y agoI think that might partly explain the advertising, they seem to be modelling themselves on that Central/Northern European, Berlin counter-culture, Girl-with-a-Dragon-Tattoo, techy-savvy hacker kind of thing. Problem is, at least from the other side of Europe, that seems like it would represent a fairly tiny demographic, and I'm not sure deliberately avoiding the mainstream, and going for semi-obscurity, is all that great a marketing idea! But, in any case, regardless of the marketing, the phone does seem promising. Seems to be the most credible of the open source challengers to Android/iOS, much more so than Ubuntu Touch, for instance, because of the direct experience of the staff and the fact that a phone is actually being sold. Also, personally speaking, it's nice to see an open source OS made by a company apparently looking to make money from selling hardware and software, as a product, rather than from leveraging user data.
- alandarev 13y agoBeing a tech-savvy european here, I just like everyone here, was totally confused by their landing page. Thus, I highly doubt they targetted anyone there.
- kayoone 13y ago> I think that might partly explain the advertising, they seem to be modelling themselves on that Central/Northern European, Berlin counter-culture, Girl-with-a-Dragon-Tattoo, techy-savvy hacker kind of thing. woo, lots of stereotypes here..i found the video to be really likeable. > Also, personally speaking, it's nice to see an open source OS made by a company apparently looking to make money from selling hardware and software, as a product, rather than from leveraging user data. That works as long as arent very successful and others start to use Sailfish
- Dewie 13y ago> I think that might partly explain the advertising, they seem to be modelling themselves on that Central/Northern European, Berlin counter-culture, Girl-with-a-Dragon-Tattoo, techy-savvy hacker kind of thing. What the heck is that?
- silverbax88 13y agoThanks for this, I too am curious as to why this isn't in the sale copy on the page. I actually thought it was a dev framework of some kind.
- geuis 13y agoPlease forward this paragraph to their web folks. Just put it right at the top as a first-read. Then everything else makes a lot more sense.
- daliusd 13y agoI'm pretty sure they can't use "Nokia" in their advertisements.
- gojomo 13y agoYes, but there's one interesting bit of fine print in the Nokia-Microsoft deal that gives the runt company (that was the old Nokia) the right to start using the Nokia name again... as of January 1, 2016: http://followingjolla.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-small-print-three-ways-nokia-can.html http://followingjolla.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-small-print-t... Of course Jolla is a different company as well... but we're barely 2 years away from more wild naming-strategery options, for Nokia-offshoot Finnish companies.
- zobzu 13y agoI'm pretty sure they can say jolla is the phone, sailfish the os, and that it comes from meego tho. and everything else without mentioning even Nokia. heh.
- daliusd 13y agoI just did experiment and asked my wife what OS is running on her phone. She has no idea. She owns N9.
- erikig 13y agoI think the idea of the site was to get the name jolla out there and to get consumers asking: what is a jolla? I believe from the questions above they've succeeded. If they just said, hey there's another phone called jolla I doubt I'd have taken a look.
- 13y ago
- salient 13y agoDidn't N900 run Maemo? Also, I'm not even sure N9 ran Meego. If it did, then it was Meego + Nokia's own UI.
- Brakenshire 13y agoAs I understand, N900 ran Maemo, which was then merged into Meego, which ran on the N9, in combination with Nokia's proprietary UI, called Harmattan. Just tried to glaze over some of the gory details for the sake of brevity. Also, Jolla seem to have built their new UI along similar lines to Harmattan (button-less, reliance on slide-from-edges etc).
- panzi 13y agoDid they make the switch to Qt 5 before the release or will the first version ship with Qt 4?
- wmf 13y agoThe real question is when are they going to announce a total rewrite of the OS that will obsolete the shipping version. Usually they announce that right about the time the phone ships.
- Brakenshire 13y agoJust found this page: https://sailfishos.org/about-technology.html https://sailfishos.org/about-technology.html They use Qt 5.
- shmerl 13y agoThey switched to Qt 5 when they had to switch from using ST-Ericsson to Qualcomm and found out that there is no way they can get X.org drivers from them. So they started using libhybris with Android drivers and Wayland on top, and that by default implied Qt 5.
- hvass 13y agoThank you so much, I couldn't figure out what they were offering exactly. ;-)
- shmerl 13y agoFor more references, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810555
- skue 13y agoYou mentioned it won't have access to Google Play or Play Services APIs. That will be a serious challenge, and they are bound to end up with a lot of frustrated customers. I don't see how they can advertise that it runs "top Android apps" & "latest Android apps" without supporting the Play Services APIs.
- Brakenshire 13y agoYeah, it'll be interesting. This really is also the key question as to whether non-Google Android distributions are actually viable. Essentially whether controlled Play Services means you control Android. Although, bear in mind that they are running their own App Store, so they should be able to filter for reliance on those APIs, which would at least mean you wouldn't have software crashing (just people somewhat mystified as to why certain Apps aren't available).
- fulafel 13y agoNot having to join your phone to Google Skynet is a major plus for many people. Also, many Android devices are in the same boat (pun intended!) as the vendors haven't licensed the proprietary bits from Google.
- kapranoff 13y agoJolla uses Yandex.Store instead of Google Play. See http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jolla-yandex/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jolla-yandex/
- sbierwagen 13y agoor the Play Services APIs Huh. So I can't use any of the Google apps, like gmail?
- josteink 13y agoNo, because Google will only license those libraries and frameworks to "pure" Android devices as certified by Google. And Google will not certify sailfish OS as Android.
- muyuu 13y agoWow. Suddenly I'm interested.