Jolla's First Phone Goes On Sale 307
jones_supa writes "Jolla, the mobile phone company formed by ex-Nokia employees, has officially launched its first phone. It will be initially available in Finland, paired with the local telecom operator DNA. After that, it will be made available in 135 other countries. The Jolla handset runs the Sailfish OS, which is itself based on the former MeeGo platform developed by Nokia and Intel several years ago to produce Linux-based smartphone software. Sailfish can run Android apps and it also integrates Nokia's Here mapping and positioning technology. Looking at the hardware, the device sports a 1.4GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor, 1GB memory and 16GB of flash storage, plus a 4.5in 960x540 IPS touchscreen with Gorilla 2 Glass. It has the usual mobile network support, including GSM/3G/4G, 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth, 8MP autofocus rear camera and 2MP front camera. SIM-free pricing is expected to be €399."
Re:How about porting it... (Score:5, Informative)
Phones capable of running Android are their major target. Interview [talouselama.fi] of the CEO from today:
In addition to applications, Jolla exploits Android’s ecosystem also in another way. Jolla’s Sailfish operating system works in almost any Android device. Due to this Jolla can subcontract its devices for a reasonable price from any smart phone manufacturing company in Asia.
....
....
One more plus for Jolla is that the Android compatibility makes it very easy for other smart phone companies now using Android to change their OS to Jolla’s Sailfish.
According to Pienimäki, Jolla is also planning to let individual users to download Sailfish operating system into their Android-devices.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmm I might get one (Score:4, Informative)
It's called BlackBerry Q10 (or Q5 if you're on a budget)
Re:Paired with.... (Score:5, Informative)
By charging a price that covers their cost; what's so mysterious?
Re:How about porting it... (Score:5, Informative)
It's also interesting to note that Wayland just shipped on a device. So much for it being "hard to fit into a mobile device." Thanks to libhybris, they just wrap the Android blob for the GPU and continue on like a standard glibc-based Linux system.
Re:How about porting it... (Score:5, Informative)
Wayland. On every one of these Jolla devices. X11 was being used early on until recent versions of Qt were released, which added the Qt Compositor API, allowing them to create their own compositor (and do some rather interesting things.)
Re:xterm? root? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Paired with.... (Score:4, Informative)
You're describing the American mobile market, things in Europe work very differently: most people buy a SIM-free phone and then use the operator they wish. Phone contracts cover only a very limited part of the market (iPhones, mostly).
Re:Pronounciation (Score:5, Informative)
Yo-lla. Finnish for "dinghy". The joke being about getting away from Elop's "burning platform".
I think they just like making new project names (Score:4, Informative)
Maemo [wikipedia.org] / Moblin [wikipedia.org] -> MeeGo [wikipedia.org] -> Harmattan -> Mer [wikipedia.org] -> Tizen [wikipedia.org] | Smeegol [wikipedia.org] | Sailfish [wikipedia.org]
Or, in other words, lets rename and start a new project every other week!
I got my N900 because it was based on the same GTK and Debian that I was familiar with on my desktop. But I never touched app development on it because of the promise of the "new" project completely obsoleting anything that I would create on the old. Why bother creating a GTK interface when the new UI gets rewritten in QT next month? Why bother creating Debian packages when the new system uses RPM? Meanwhile, the Osborne effect [wikipedia.org] ensures that no mainstream apps get written for the current code base.
Re:Why such low specs (Score:5, Informative)
It's really not that rosy.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/21/googles-iron-grip-on-android [wired.co.uk] for some context.
'For OEMs, this means they aren't allowed to slowly transition from Google's Android to a fork. The second they ship one device that runs a competing fork, they are given the kiss of death and booted out of the Android family -- it must be a clean break. This, by design, makes switching to forked Android a terrifying prospect to any established Android OEM. You must jump off the Google cliff, and there's no going back.'
There is _NO_ automated process for getting an android device appoved.
Do one thing that google does not like, and you cannot legally ship any of the google apps - which as the above article explains - means many, or most apps on the google store break, even if you try to simply copy them over, as the platform services are not open source.
Re:big repo, man (Score:4, Informative)
Compatibility with Android should be *much* higher than with wine. They have the source code for a start... They both target Linus' kernel. They're both based around OpenGL (ES) for drawing.
Re:xterm? root? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Paired with.... (Score:4, Informative)
In europe, phone contracts are still the most popular way to get a phone but the phones are nearly always unlocked (especially nowadays) and can be reused after the contract ends by putting a payg sim in, or migrating to a sim-only contract (which seem to be increasingly popular)
The thing the US carriers don't get is that people will always go with a contract as it spreads the cost of their new phone out, like buying one with a finance deal. They don't need to be locked at all. Even if you sell a sim-only contract, you make money off the punter, you only need to subsidise handsets if you have an exclusive deal for a must-have new model,and even then.. people will come to you to buy them anyway.
The US carrier lockdown is simply stupid, something in place by executives who can only think they exist to abuse their customers rather than provide a competitive service. America, ha.