9 ms·

The Jolla phone – first impressions

167 points by emilsedgh 13y ago

manmal 13y ago
I can't believe that no pixels can be seen on a 4,5" screen with a resolution of 960x540. That would be a worse density than my > 3 year old HTC desire. A mistake in the article?
- caberus 13y ago
  strongly agree, ppi is high but far from the top phones on the market.
- Geee 13y ago
  I think they wanted to go pretty low-end with their first device and also be forward thinking about it, because that resolution is half of 1080p.
  - josu 13y ago
    I'd say that it's a forth of 1080p.
- veeti 13y ago
  This entire piece sounds overly positive about the thing. We get it, it's a real Linux phone, but the hardware is lackluster for 2013. That shitty screen resolution sounds like the final nail in the coffin for me.
  - kayoone 13y ago
    to be fair its only 399, so they dont seem to target top of the line.
    - icelancer 13y ago
      And the Google Nexus 5 is $350, unlocked with no restrictions.
      - jstsch 13y ago
        These people need to make money selling the actual phone. Comparing Nexus pricing makes no sense (well, it does of course from the consumers perspective...)
      - nicholassmith 13y ago
        I'd avoid using the nexus devices as a base price, google doesn't need to make profit on them so they can run them low.
      - acchow 13y ago
        And the Moto G is $180...
      - blntechie 13y ago
        Nokia Lumia 520 which has similar resolution (480 x 800) is 79$ and in fact you can get one for 49$ today. Off contract. I know that HN is not fond of WP but just comparing hardware here.
        kayoone 13y ago
        Despite the resolution being lower, the Lumia also has a much slower CPU, GPU, 5MP vs 8MP camera etc...
  - mercurial 13y ago
    > This entire piece sounds overly positive about the thing. Indeed it is refreshing and is leads the industry forward by leaps and bounds. Clearly an impartial review. On the other hand, I like the Other Half concept, and I'd be interested with a more beefed-up version in a Galaxy Note form factor, with a stylus.
  - alextingle 13y ago
    Screen resolution is literally the last thing I care about. Give me an extra hour of battery life & I'll take a lower rs display. Give me an extra day of battery life & I'm in heaven.
- buster 13y ago
  To be honest i believe that all this retina bullshit that was started by apple is too much. Really, i am wondering how good the battery life of my phone would be without a fullhd display.. on a tiny size... that's just stupid, most people just wouldn't notice a lower resolution in everyday use but they would notice improved battery life. To me the resolution battle is the same BS that the megapixel count on photo sensors is. It's mainly marketing talk to sell devices. So please, i don't care if the phone doesn't have fullhd, and i also don't need 5" displays.. or a 40 MP camera, i dont need octacore cpus or opengl XYZ capability. I want battery life, please work on the f*cking battery life!! p.s.: my "rant" doesn't mean that the jolla has a good battery life, of course i wouldn't know about that. Just addressing my main problem with smartpones.
- magnet_ball 13y ago
  That's 330 ppi by my calculation. The iphone has the same pixel density and it is very much good. I don't see the reason to push 1080 pixels on my tiny 4.5 or even 5 inch phone.
smcl 13y ago
Minor nitpick: I don't know how to say "Jolla". I mean I know that "Jolla" is pronounced "Hoya" in European Spanish ("Hosha" in Argentinian), but in most European languages it'd be "Yolla" with a soft "j" and the naive English pronunciation would be "Djolla". I don't know which was the intended one. Not that it really matters I suppose, but why go to all that trouble building an apparently lovely device and giving it a slightly cumbersome name?
- espadrine 13y ago
  I can't help but hear "the YOLO phone". eg. http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/20/jolla-phone-hardware-tour/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/20/jolla-phone-hardware-tour...
- enra 13y ago
  Jolla means "light boat" in Finnish. I guess it's a tongue in cheek for the Elop's burning platform speech, where Jolla is the light boat getting a away from it. (Agree that for global products, people should prefer names that are easier to pronounce)
  - smartaleckkill 13y ago
    It also occurred to me that with Nokia's history as a rubber manufacturer they're bound to have made rubber rafts at some point (which would indeed be called `jolla'). Or I could be completely overreading this...
    - pimeys 13y ago
      They made, and are still making excellent rubber boots. http://www.prisma.fi/tuotekuvat//large/71/1bz60y0a4pi3kq31.jpg http://www.prisma.fi/tuotekuvat//large/71/1bz60y0a4pi3kq31.j... But jolla is a small boat.
- Geee 13y ago
  It's pronounced Yolla. Like they say it in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64ja7WBHU8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64ja7WBHU8
dirtyaura 13y ago
This is the first post that really sparked my imagination about The Other Half. Lots of possibilities to build dedicated devices to different environments and tasks. Jolla really should make their marketing material more concrete to target their true early adopter audience.
- jhm_ 13y ago
  I have an idea for The Other Half: an Xbee 802.15.4 module that could facilitate a distributed telecommunications network between mobile handsets. I have my eye on David Rowe's open source codec2 to support voice calls because it can achieve telephone quality at 1400 bits-per-second, and I think that at this bandwidth multiple calls can be relayed efficiently, (and _securely_), though a mesh network. If a handset has WiFi access then calls can then route through the internet and path around the world. If we want to continue to use the antiquated practice of telephone numbers as identifiers, then we can use cryptographic primatives and a blockchain, (like bitcoin), to prove telephone number-handset authenticity on the new peer-to-peer network. Combine this with a Jolla phone for a connection to a conventional cellular network and perhaps a handset could move seamlessly through peer-to-peer calling, handset-to-VoIP calling, and the PTSN. Then the day may come where we can finally do away with these telecommunications companies, and have a decentralized and secure-by-design phone system once and for all.
Aardwolf 13y ago
An observation I have been wondering: Whenever a Windows phone is presented, there are pictures of phones that have more square corners than other phones, and flashy colors like yellow and orange. It seems to be almost a requirement of a phone with the Windows software, to have colorful and squary hardware. Is that a coincidence, or a sort of design convention or requirement? EDIT: Oops, apparently it does not run Windows. I saw the tiles in the screenshot and flashy colors, so thought it was Windows phone... Sorry...
- _sabe_ 13y ago
  I don't know if this was just a random comment or if you missed that this phone does not run windows? :)
- emilsedgh 13y ago
  This is not a windows phone. It uses SailfishOS[0] which is basically a continuation of Maemo/Meego. [0] https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- anonymfus 13y ago
  This is not requerment. First generation of WP7 phones had few curvy models, but square corners was a trend already. Flashy colours were popularised by Nokia, they had similar design before switching to Windows Phone, so HTC and Huawey just copied them for WP models. Samsung Ativ S is example of curvy black WP8 phone.
  - anonymfus 13y ago
    Returning to the topic, MeeGo based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 had almost the same design as their first WP7 phone Lumia 800.
    - 13y ago
veeti 13y ago
> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps. What is the "long term"? Has somebody actually managed to build a native HTML5-based UI that isn't a laggy and clumsy piece of shit yet? For example, webOS looked great but even the simplest lists scrolled with less than 30 frames per second. The videos I've seen of FxOS don't show much promise either (although those are running on really low-end hardware). I'm really skeptical that trying to shoehorn something called "hypertext markup language" and a generic web rendering engine like WebKit into a UI toolkit is ever going to work smoothly. Even on my desktop computer complex sites can work slowly at times. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
- bergie 13y ago
  Read this one: http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
- reubenmorais 13y ago
  FxOS runs at 50+ FPS for pretty much all of the built-in UI, even on lower end phones like the Geeksphone Keon. Higher end phones are actually really fast, like the LG Fireweb (released in Brazil a couple weeks ago) and the GP Peak.
- djjose 13y ago
  I'm curious about this POV from folks of getting mobile web apps to look and feel like mobile native apps being a prerequisite for success. I just don't think this is true. After all, desktop web apps look and feel nothing like desktop native apps. I too believe that mobile web will one day overtake mobile native apps for most peoples' daily usage. I just don't think it'll look or act anything like what we're currently doing. Luke Wroblewski gives a great talk about the early days of a new medium being an awkward state where we try to shoehorn what worked in the last medium into it. At some point we'll figure out a design and usage patten for the mobile web that'll make a world of sense in hindsight. We're just not there yet IMO and of course I have no idea what this looks like.
  - 13y ago
45g 13y ago
What puzzles me about Jolla and it's Sailfish OS is the constant emphasis on being "truly open" when in fact the sources of the OS are nowhere to be found. They point you to projects such as Mer and say Sailfish OS is based on it but by the same logic Apple is "truly open" because OS X is based on Darwin.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- shmerl 13y ago
  It's not fully open. See http://piratepad.net/JollaSoftwareState http://piratepad.net/JollaSoftwareState However Jolla said that long term plans about opening things up aren't finalized.
adamwong246 13y ago
Well I'm sold. That sounds awesome.
bostik 13y ago
As someone who spent quite a lot of time getting QtWebKit built and kept up-to-date on Mer, both for Qt 4.8 and 5.x, I'm somewhat torn to see this: > We heard at the launch event that the rendering engine is Gecko On one hand, I feel a little sad. On the other hand, I can appreciate the idea of going with a browser engine that isn't as big a political playing field as WebKit. (Or its Google-fork: Blink.) The reasons that led to this decision might be interesting.
- azakai 13y ago
  Interesting. I remember that Meego went back and forth between WebKit and Gecko, but that was a long time ago, I would also be interested to hear how things ended up that way.
  - bostik 13y ago
    > I remember that Meego went back and forth between WebKit and Gecko I know at least one very good reason, from personal pain. Meego preceded Qt 5.0. QtWebKit was not part of official Qt releases until 5.1, and in 4.x the situation was even worse. Back then QtWebKit was always a second-class citizen. The browser engine was a separate "Qt component". This meant that all releases were done individually, outside and out of pace with the Qt proper. Any release lagged behind the Qt releases, taking anywhere from weeks to months to catch up and work with the most recent Qt release. I got the idea that the webkit team was severely undermanned and overworked. This meant that for any product that wanted to use QtWebKit, the product manager had to make an early decision to lock the version of used Qt just to ensure that QtWebKit was available. (Customers demanded a working browser engine with bells and whistles.) So from a purely practical point of view it made sense to decouple the browser engine and Qt release at architectural level. No wonder Meego hovered between the two options. They had the choice of not using the latest Qt releases but having a more finely integrated browser engine - or they could go with the latest Qt, a decoupled browser engine and doing a horrible amount of additional integration work to keep Qt and Gecko in sync. As one can imagine, neither of those options is particularly appealing.
nicholassmith 13y ago
I do Qt development for a living, as well as iOS work, so the Jolla has my interest piqued. This review is overly effusive but I can't shake the feeling that I really, really want one to see where this platform could go. It certainly doesn't look boring.
sleepyK 13y ago
Hope they release their sources soon, so I can compile and try it out on my Nexus... Hopefully being the most open mobile OS means easy compiling...
Untit1ed 13y ago
Reading this I had to repeatedly scroll up to make absolutely sure I wasn't just reading a Jolla press release... I'd love for this to be as great as it's described here, but I'll be waiting for an actual impartial review.
nl 13y ago
This sounds like one of those "the sky is not falling" reviews of a Maemo phone in 2009, that ignores the (pretty huge) flaws of the platform because the author is a fan. You can see hints in this review: It should be is easy to search the web, enter URLs, open new tabs, save bookmarks etc. All of this can be done with the current browser in SailfishOS. The browser seems to work pretty fast and flawlessly. We heard at the launch event that the rendering engine is Gecko (same as in Firefox) so it is likely to have good support for HTML5 features. However in terms of usability, Chrome for Android is still the best mobile browser we’ve used so far. In particular the SailfishOS browser does not seem to have support for landscape mode. Hopefully while SailfishOS matures, the browser will grow to be more polished as well. So.. the whole point of this phone is HTML5 apps. Yet Chrome is a more usable browser, and the author is hopeful the native browser "will grow to be more polished as well". Android apps can be run using Alien Dalvik (probably some sort of virtual machine layer). You can either get both free and paid apps from the bundled Yandex store No mention at all of the huge problems with this approach: this means no Google Play Services, and it removes all motivation for developers to build native apps: they can just point users at the Android version. (Also, Yandex has an Android store?!)
- smartaleckkill 13y ago
  No-one said the whole point of the phone is HTML5 apps. The reviewer thinks HTML5 apps are the future, that's all. Native Sailfish apps are Qt based; with android apps as a secondary thing, presumably to kick-start the platform while they try to build an ecosystem. (Which makes sense, developers won't come unless people are using it but people won't use it if there are no apps.)
  - nl 13y ago
    Yeah, that's probably a fair point. It wasn't clear until I looked at the architecture diagram, though. Native Sailfish apps are Qt based; with android apps as a secondary thing, presumably to kick-start the platform while they try to build an ecosystem. (Which makes sense, developers won't come unless people are using it but people won't use it if there are no apps.) I'm guessing that was Blackberry's strategy too. Didn't work for them - be interesting to see how well it works here.
brunnsbe 13y ago
Here is a more honest article (in Finnish) from someone who have used the device for a day: http://mobiili.fi/2013/11/28/jolla-vuorokauden-kaytossa-tassa-10-ajatusta/ http://mobiili.fi/2013/11/28/jolla-vuorokauden-kaytossa-tass... English translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmobiili.fi%2F2013%2F11%2F28%2Fjolla-vuorokauden-kaytossa-tassa-10-ajatusta%2F http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=n&prev=... According to the article the biggest problem seems to be Internet-connectivity, the reception is sometimes bad and it has problems connecting to WLAN. The browser is also quite slow and needs improvements.
- Kluny 13y ago
  Jolla is hilariously translated to Dinghy throughout the article.
valvoja 13y ago
Meh. I'd wait for the first few objective reviews. I lost interest when they said things like "there is one hardware feature that is unique to Jolla: The Other Half [...] a concept of user-changeable smart back cover." Surely replaceable plastic covers have been around for decades and they are mostly associated with low-end feature phones... or really old Nokias.
- jonpacker 13y ago
  "The Other Half" on Jolla has a serial port which makes it possible for it to be a keyboard or a battery or an external device.
- leoedin 13y ago
  So you lost interest... and stopped reading completely? Had you read any further you would have realised that the unique feature is that there's both a power connector and an I2C interface available to those back covers. It's a pretty brilliant concept - you could interface with the whole host of cool chips which use I2C, or even build yourself a little robot chassis.
  - valvoja 13y ago
    Power connector like the wireless chargers by Nokia etc? Not sure what a I2C interface is... My point is that I would prefer objective reviews, not glowing praise from fans etc. The key question for is not what tech did they pack in a small screen device, but does it actually feel better to use than the incumbents.
    - leoedin 13y ago
      If you don't know what an I2C interface is, then you're not in a position to make the criticism that you made. If you were at all interested in expanding your knowledge, a simple google search would reveal that it's a ubiquitous serial interface for communicating with peripheral chips. All that requires more work than just blindly making critical comments on an online message board though, so why bother?
xutopia 13y ago
It's interesting but looking at the video at the bottom of the article it looks like swipe gestures on the photo album lag considerably. Has anyone had the chance to play with it?
contingencies 13y ago
Interesting timing: I received my first FirefoxOS device yesterday. It works. It cost $80. Looking at this phone, which targets a far higher price point, I am forced to consider their differences: Contribute development effort towards getting the rest of the planet online and empowered? ... or help nords preserve their heritage of mobile device architecture? Mozilla and Wikimedia are working hard to provide equal access to all under an open platform. Considering the growth trajectory for the developing world (widely recognized by macro-economists), we can each commercially justify time investment in the FirefoxOS platform. As the web's new primary class of access devices, mobile devices for the developing world are a big part of our shared future. Let's keep it open.
chemmail 13y ago
The pull down menu looks TERRIBLE. You need to look at it and have precision. It's much easier to have a button u can easily tap just from a glance.

167 points by emilsedgh 13y ago

I can't believe that no pixels can be seen on a 4,5" screen with a resolution of 960x540. That would be a worse density than my > 3 year old HTC desire. A mistake in the article?

caberus 13y ago
strongly agree, ppi is high but far from the top phones on the market.
Geee 13y ago
I think they wanted to go pretty low-end with their first device and also be forward thinking about it, because that resolution is half of 1080p.
- josu 13y ago
  I'd say that it's a forth of 1080p.
veeti 13y ago
This entire piece sounds overly positive about the thing. We get it, it's a real Linux phone, but the hardware is lackluster for 2013. That shitty screen resolution sounds like the final nail in the coffin for me.
- kayoone 13y ago
  to be fair its only 399, so they dont seem to target top of the line.
  - icelancer 13y ago
    And the Google Nexus 5 is $350, unlocked with no restrictions.
    - jstsch 13y ago
      These people need to make money selling the actual phone. Comparing Nexus pricing makes no sense (well, it does of course from the consumers perspective...)
    - nicholassmith 13y ago
      I'd avoid using the nexus devices as a base price, google doesn't need to make profit on them so they can run them low.
    - acchow 13y ago
      And the Moto G is $180...
    - blntechie 13y ago
      Nokia Lumia 520 which has similar resolution (480 x 800) is 79$ and in fact you can get one for 49$ today. Off contract. I know that HN is not fond of WP but just comparing hardware here.
      - kayoone 13y ago
        Despite the resolution being lower, the Lumia also has a much slower CPU, GPU, 5MP vs 8MP camera etc...
- mercurial 13y ago
  > This entire piece sounds overly positive about the thing. Indeed it is refreshing and is leads the industry forward by leaps and bounds. Clearly an impartial review. On the other hand, I like the Other Half concept, and I'd be interested with a more beefed-up version in a Galaxy Note form factor, with a stylus.
- alextingle 13y ago
  Screen resolution is literally the last thing I care about. Give me an extra hour of battery life & I'll take a lower rs display. Give me an extra day of battery life & I'm in heaven.
buster 13y ago
To be honest i believe that all this retina bullshit that was started by apple is too much. Really, i am wondering how good the battery life of my phone would be without a fullhd display.. on a tiny size... that's just stupid, most people just wouldn't notice a lower resolution in everyday use but they would notice improved battery life. To me the resolution battle is the same BS that the megapixel count on photo sensors is. It's mainly marketing talk to sell devices. So please, i don't care if the phone doesn't have fullhd, and i also don't need 5" displays.. or a 40 MP camera, i dont need octacore cpus or opengl XYZ capability. I want battery life, please work on the f*cking battery life!! p.s.: my "rant" doesn't mean that the jolla has a good battery life, of course i wouldn't know about that. Just addressing my main problem with smartpones.
magnet_ball 13y ago
That's 330 ppi by my calculation. The iphone has the same pixel density and it is very much good. I don't see the reason to push 1080 pixels on my tiny 4.5 or even 5 inch phone.

smcl 13y ago

Minor nitpick: I don't know how to say "Jolla". I mean I know that "Jolla" is pronounced "Hoya" in European Spanish ("Hosha" in Argentinian), but in most European languages it'd be "Yolla" with a soft "j" and the naive English pronunciation would be "Djolla". I don't know which was the intended one. Not that it really matters I suppose, but why go to all that trouble building an apparently lovely device and giving it a slightly cumbersome name?

espadrine 13y ago
I can't help but hear "the YOLO phone". eg. http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/20/jolla-phone-hardware-tour/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/20/jolla-phone-hardware-tour...
enra 13y ago
Jolla means "light boat" in Finnish. I guess it's a tongue in cheek for the Elop's burning platform speech, where Jolla is the light boat getting a away from it. (Agree that for global products, people should prefer names that are easier to pronounce)
- smartaleckkill 13y ago
  It also occurred to me that with Nokia's history as a rubber manufacturer they're bound to have made rubber rafts at some point (which would indeed be called `jolla'). Or I could be completely overreading this...
  - pimeys 13y ago
    They made, and are still making excellent rubber boots. http://www.prisma.fi/tuotekuvat//large/71/1bz60y0a4pi3kq31.jpg http://www.prisma.fi/tuotekuvat//large/71/1bz60y0a4pi3kq31.j... But jolla is a small boat.
Geee 13y ago
It's pronounced Yolla. Like they say it in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64ja7WBHU8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64ja7WBHU8

dirtyaura 13y ago

This is the first post that really sparked my imagination about The Other Half. Lots of possibilities to build dedicated devices to different environments and tasks. Jolla really should make their marketing material more concrete to target their true early adopter audience.

jhm_ 13y ago
I have an idea for The Other Half: an Xbee 802.15.4 module that could facilitate a distributed telecommunications network between mobile handsets. I have my eye on David Rowe's open source codec2 to support voice calls because it can achieve telephone quality at 1400 bits-per-second, and I think that at this bandwidth multiple calls can be relayed efficiently, (and _securely_), though a mesh network. If a handset has WiFi access then calls can then route through the internet and path around the world. If we want to continue to use the antiquated practice of telephone numbers as identifiers, then we can use cryptographic primatives and a blockchain, (like bitcoin), to prove telephone number-handset authenticity on the new peer-to-peer network. Combine this with a Jolla phone for a connection to a conventional cellular network and perhaps a handset could move seamlessly through peer-to-peer calling, handset-to-VoIP calling, and the PTSN. Then the day may come where we can finally do away with these telecommunications companies, and have a decentralized and secure-by-design phone system once and for all.

Aardwolf 13y ago

An observation I have been wondering: Whenever a Windows phone is presented, there are pictures of phones that have more square corners than other phones, and flashy colors like yellow and orange. It seems to be almost a requirement of a phone with the Windows software, to have colorful and squary hardware. Is that a coincidence, or a sort of design convention or requirement? EDIT: Oops, apparently it does not run Windows. I saw the tiles in the screenshot and flashy colors, so thought it was Windows phone... Sorry...

_sabe_ 13y ago
I don't know if this was just a random comment or if you missed that this phone does not run windows? :)
emilsedgh 13y ago
This is not a windows phone. It uses SailfishOS[0] which is basically a continuation of Maemo/Meego. [0] https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
anonymfus 13y ago
This is not requerment. First generation of WP7 phones had few curvy models, but square corners was a trend already. Flashy colours were popularised by Nokia, they had similar design before switching to Windows Phone, so HTC and Huawey just copied them for WP models. Samsung Ativ S is example of curvy black WP8 phone.
- anonymfus 13y ago
  Returning to the topic, MeeGo based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 had almost the same design as their first WP7 phone Lumia 800.
  - 13y ago

veeti 13y ago

> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps. What is the "long term"? Has somebody actually managed to build a native HTML5-based UI that isn't a laggy and clumsy piece of shit yet? For example, webOS looked great but even the simplest lists scrolled with less than 30 frames per second. The videos I've seen of FxOS don't show much promise either (although those are running on really low-end hardware). I'm really skeptical that trying to shoehorn something called "hypertext markup language" and a generic web rendering engine like WebKit into a UI toolkit is ever going to work smoothly. Even on my desktop computer complex sites can work slowly at times. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

bergie 13y ago
Read this one: http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
reubenmorais 13y ago
FxOS runs at 50+ FPS for pretty much all of the built-in UI, even on lower end phones like the Geeksphone Keon. Higher end phones are actually really fast, like the LG Fireweb (released in Brazil a couple weeks ago) and the GP Peak.
djjose 13y ago
I'm curious about this POV from folks of getting mobile web apps to look and feel like mobile native apps being a prerequisite for success. I just don't think this is true. After all, desktop web apps look and feel nothing like desktop native apps. I too believe that mobile web will one day overtake mobile native apps for most peoples' daily usage. I just don't think it'll look or act anything like what we're currently doing. Luke Wroblewski gives a great talk about the early days of a new medium being an awkward state where we try to shoehorn what worked in the last medium into it. At some point we'll figure out a design and usage patten for the mobile web that'll make a world of sense in hindsight. We're just not there yet IMO and of course I have no idea what this looks like.
- 13y ago

45g 13y ago

What puzzles me about Jolla and it's Sailfish OS is the constant emphasis on being "truly open" when in fact the sources of the OS are nowhere to be found. They point you to projects such as Mer and say Sailfish OS is based on it but by the same logic Apple is "truly open" because OS X is based on Darwin.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
shmerl 13y ago
It's not fully open. See http://piratepad.net/JollaSoftwareState http://piratepad.net/JollaSoftwareState However Jolla said that long term plans about opening things up aren't finalized.

adamwong246 13y ago

Well I'm sold. That sounds awesome.

bostik 13y ago

As someone who spent quite a lot of time getting QtWebKit built and kept up-to-date on Mer, both for Qt 4.8 and 5.x, I'm somewhat torn to see this: > We heard at the launch event that the rendering engine is Gecko On one hand, I feel a little sad. On the other hand, I can appreciate the idea of going with a browser engine that isn't as big a political playing field as WebKit. (Or its Google-fork: Blink.) The reasons that led to this decision might be interesting.

azakai 13y ago
Interesting. I remember that Meego went back and forth between WebKit and Gecko, but that was a long time ago, I would also be interested to hear how things ended up that way.
- bostik 13y ago
  > I remember that Meego went back and forth between WebKit and Gecko I know at least one very good reason, from personal pain. Meego preceded Qt 5.0. QtWebKit was not part of official Qt releases until 5.1, and in 4.x the situation was even worse. Back then QtWebKit was always a second-class citizen. The browser engine was a separate "Qt component". This meant that all releases were done individually, outside and out of pace with the Qt proper. Any release lagged behind the Qt releases, taking anywhere from weeks to months to catch up and work with the most recent Qt release. I got the idea that the webkit team was severely undermanned and overworked. This meant that for any product that wanted to use QtWebKit, the product manager had to make an early decision to lock the version of used Qt just to ensure that QtWebKit was available. (Customers demanded a working browser engine with bells and whistles.) So from a purely practical point of view it made sense to decouple the browser engine and Qt release at architectural level. No wonder Meego hovered between the two options. They had the choice of not using the latest Qt releases but having a more finely integrated browser engine - or they could go with the latest Qt, a decoupled browser engine and doing a horrible amount of additional integration work to keep Qt and Gecko in sync. As one can imagine, neither of those options is particularly appealing.

nicholassmith 13y ago

I do Qt development for a living, as well as iOS work, so the Jolla has my interest piqued. This review is overly effusive but I can't shake the feeling that I really, really want one to see where this platform could go. It certainly doesn't look boring.

sleepyK 13y ago

Hope they release their sources soon, so I can compile and try it out on my Nexus... Hopefully being the most open mobile OS means easy compiling...

Untit1ed 13y ago

Reading this I had to repeatedly scroll up to make absolutely sure I wasn't just reading a Jolla press release... I'd love for this to be as great as it's described here, but I'll be waiting for an actual impartial review.

nl 13y ago

This sounds like one of those "the sky is not falling" reviews of a Maemo phone in 2009, that ignores the (pretty huge) flaws of the platform because the author is a fan. You can see hints in this review: It should be is easy to search the web, enter URLs, open new tabs, save bookmarks etc. All of this can be done with the current browser in SailfishOS. The browser seems to work pretty fast and flawlessly. We heard at the launch event that the rendering engine is Gecko (same as in Firefox) so it is likely to have good support for HTML5 features. However in terms of usability, Chrome for Android is still the best mobile browser we’ve used so far. In particular the SailfishOS browser does not seem to have support for landscape mode. Hopefully while SailfishOS matures, the browser will grow to be more polished as well. So.. the whole point of this phone is HTML5 apps. Yet Chrome is a more usable browser, and the author is hopeful the native browser "will grow to be more polished as well". Android apps can be run using Alien Dalvik (probably some sort of virtual machine layer). You can either get both free and paid apps from the bundled Yandex store No mention at all of the huge problems with this approach: this means no Google Play Services, and it removes all motivation for developers to build native apps: they can just point users at the Android version. (Also, Yandex has an Android store?!)

smartaleckkill 13y ago
No-one said the whole point of the phone is HTML5 apps. The reviewer thinks HTML5 apps are the future, that's all. Native Sailfish apps are Qt based; with android apps as a secondary thing, presumably to kick-start the platform while they try to build an ecosystem. (Which makes sense, developers won't come unless people are using it but people won't use it if there are no apps.)
- nl 13y ago
  Yeah, that's probably a fair point. It wasn't clear until I looked at the architecture diagram, though. Native Sailfish apps are Qt based; with android apps as a secondary thing, presumably to kick-start the platform while they try to build an ecosystem. (Which makes sense, developers won't come unless people are using it but people won't use it if there are no apps.) I'm guessing that was Blackberry's strategy too. Didn't work for them - be interesting to see how well it works here.

brunnsbe 13y ago

Here is a more honest article (in Finnish) from someone who have used the device for a day: http://mobiili.fi/2013/11/28/jolla-vuorokauden-kaytossa-tassa-10-ajatusta/ http://mobiili.fi/2013/11/28/jolla-vuorokauden-kaytossa-tass... English translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmobiili.fi%2F2013%2F11%2F28%2Fjolla-vuorokauden-kaytossa-tassa-10-ajatusta%2F http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fi&tl=en&js=n&prev=... According to the article the biggest problem seems to be Internet-connectivity, the reception is sometimes bad and it has problems connecting to WLAN. The browser is also quite slow and needs improvements.

Kluny 13y ago
Jolla is hilariously translated to Dinghy throughout the article.

valvoja 13y ago

Meh. I'd wait for the first few objective reviews. I lost interest when they said things like "there is one hardware feature that is unique to Jolla: The Other Half [...] a concept of user-changeable smart back cover." Surely replaceable plastic covers have been around for decades and they are mostly associated with low-end feature phones... or really old Nokias.

jonpacker 13y ago
"The Other Half" on Jolla has a serial port which makes it possible for it to be a keyboard or a battery or an external device.
leoedin 13y ago
So you lost interest... and stopped reading completely? Had you read any further you would have realised that the unique feature is that there's both a power connector and an I2C interface available to those back covers. It's a pretty brilliant concept - you could interface with the whole host of cool chips which use I2C, or even build yourself a little robot chassis.
- valvoja 13y ago
  Power connector like the wireless chargers by Nokia etc? Not sure what a I2C interface is... My point is that I would prefer objective reviews, not glowing praise from fans etc. The key question for is not what tech did they pack in a small screen device, but does it actually feel better to use than the incumbents.
  - leoedin 13y ago
    If you don't know what an I2C interface is, then you're not in a position to make the criticism that you made. If you were at all interested in expanding your knowledge, a simple google search would reveal that it's a ubiquitous serial interface for communicating with peripheral chips. All that requires more work than just blindly making critical comments on an online message board though, so why bother?

xutopia 13y ago

It's interesting but looking at the video at the bottom of the article it looks like swipe gestures on the photo album lag considerably. Has anyone had the chance to play with it?

contingencies 13y ago

Interesting timing: I received my first FirefoxOS device yesterday. It works. It cost $80. Looking at this phone, which targets a far higher price point, I am forced to consider their differences: Contribute development effort towards getting the rest of the planet online and empowered? ... or help nords preserve their heritage of mobile device architecture? Mozilla and Wikimedia are working hard to provide equal access to all under an open platform. Considering the growth trajectory for the developing world (widely recognized by macro-economists), we can each commercially justify time investment in the FirefoxOS platform. As the web's new primary class of access devices, mobile devices for the developing world are a big part of our shared future. Let's keep it open.

chemmail 13y ago

The pull down menu looks TERRIBLE. You need to look at it and have precision. It's much easier to have a button u can easily tap just from a glance.