Jolla’s first batch of Sailfish smartphones is fully booked | Hacker News Reader

Jolla’s first batch of Sailfish smartphones is fully booked

thenextweb.com

40 pointsprogrammerby17 comments

Jolla probably has the best chance of success among the new entrants to the handset OS business. They are not relying on Web apps and the browser runtime, and the people at Jolla have a lot of experience combining Linux and mature, first-tier telephony products.

I think Firefox OS has a good chance, too, but they are completely dependent on making Web apps work well on a battery powered device. So far, that's hasn't been a winning approach.

Samsung will surely ship a Tizen phone, but it's a strange joint venture with Intel, and these supposed partners have divergent goals.

I don't know if Ubuntu has a launch partner, and the Edge thing was a distraction. I'm an Ubuntu desktop user, and I wish I could get Ubuntu on a tablet and see the usability issues dealt with. But I'm sure Jolla could make a nice tablet, too. Microsoft created an odd self-injury by creating three OSs with lots of common underlying technology and poor compatibility and lots of restrictions on what kinds of apps run on each one. Ubuntu or other Linux-based OSs could show how it's done, and with a leading position among desktop Linuxes, I'm hoping Ubuntu will do that.

In a resource/power constrained device, the last thing I want is to have all my apps restricted to a heavy-weight VM. Jolla and Ubuntu both offer native applications.

I haven't used Jolla yet, but I love the gesture based Ubuntu and Blackberry 10 UIs. If Android and iOS don't move in this direction, they will get left behind.

I have used Jolla's Sailfish OS and it is the best mobile UI out there, period. When I first used it, excited me in a way I haven't felt since I first used the original iPhone in 2007.

Every aspect of the UI is designed to be a superb mobile experience for simple, one-handed use.

Whereas other platforms compromise the phone UI to force a consistency with other form factors as part of a larger strategic play, the Sailfish team had one focus: make the best damn phone UI possible.

Android has very very few global gestures. That was an intentional design decision, with global navigation working through the Back, Home, and Recent buttons. I don't think that is functionally inferior to global gestures, and it makes it possible for apps use use more gestures for app-specific UI.

Edge gestures are so fast and intuitive to use, I don't think they should be reserved for apps. The two I find particular useful are the top-edge down to access messages and the bottom-edge up to access your Task Manager.

Have you used a phone with an off-screen touch area? Using them for global command makes perfect sense to me. The apps can use whatever gestures they want inside the bezel.

Aww, you got me thinking of the gesture area on the Palm Pre...sheds a tear, renews vow to never buy HP anything out of spite

On Android, top-down is used to open the Notifications (where new messages and other pieces of info come in), and starting with some 4.x release, bottom-up opens Google search / Google Now for you.

That may be the case for nexus, but on my HTC One that bottom-up gesture doesn't work

About ms, it's about time people realize they always subsided dev costs of new windows... Xp was paid by Me, 7 was paid by Vista. And if you take that in mind, 8 was the most successful "money flop version" so far, so maybe they will have something significant later on...

Switched from iPhone 5 to Nokia N9 and I'm loving it. Can't believe how superior MeeGo is to iOS and how it was ignored.

I will definitely purchase a Jolla/Sailfish device in the future.

Meego wasn't just ignored, it was killed so it wouldn't embarrass Windows Phone. You have to wonder if Nokia could have made a billion each quarter instead of taking a handout from Microsoft, much of which was returned in licensing fees.

I have a 2-way tie for "best smartphone made" between the N9 and the HP Pre 3. Both even today offer an experience that is simply brilliant.

it's a shame the N9's Swipe UI didn't come into existence until after Elop and the BoD committed to giving Nokia a lobotomy and turning it into just another OEM...maybe it would have swayed enough minds to stop what happened.

I look forward to Jolla breaking this tie though and establishing itself as number 1.

who cares, my n900 using maemo is still doing the job

Same here - but I hope that Jolla can produce a viable N900 replacement for the future. It seems to be the only Linux based Smartphone platform currently in development that offers and is based on a "normal" Linux environment.

Darn! How I hate those me-too posts :)

Another very happy N900 owner here, with a brand new N9 in reserve if that one croaks.

Even though there's hardly any new software available (which I knew when I bought it) it's probably the best phone I ever owned.

I didn't (yet) sign up for Sailfish, but I'm very interested what will come out of this project.

Mine isn't - it started off underpowered, and before the thick-client javascript wave came and broke the internet. Browsing on it has become like torture.

I'd rather have my N900 than any other phone on the market, though.

you can always chroot

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