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Jolla

jolla.com

734 pointsGeee250 comments

They seem to put a lot of effort into telling you things other than "what is this thing?"

It sorta looks like a phone. Is it a phone? "Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS." Sweet. How is that relevant? It must be important because it spends the rest of the page telling you about the OS.

I'm back here, with honestly no idea what it is. Probably not the impression they want to leave on people, assuming (as a guess) that this is a consumer product of some kind.

It seems they put the engineers in charge of designing the website.

On the homepage "Jolla.com" it says: Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS, a truly open and distinct mobile operating system. Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface and load the phone with top Android™ apps.

So it is a phone since they call it a phone. :)

Beyond that simple statement, I'd agree with Jason. My first impression upon reading their webpage was "why?" Scrolling through I didn't find an answer. No differentiator in apps, function, power, memory or price.

I've often been wrong when I wondered that about a product, for this once I genuinely would like to know if there's an answer to the question. Why a new phone called Jolla?

Imagine the difference had they said "Jolla is a smart phone powered by Sailfish OS, a truly open and distinct mobile operating system. Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface and load it with top Android™ apps." rather than bury the most important point on the whole website as a single word at the end of a long paragraph full of technical jargon.

That would qualify as calling it a phone. Better still would be "Jolla is a smart phone", dispensing with 28 unnecessary words.

Hopefully somebody at their end has the homepage up in an editor and can make the fix.

Agreed although I would push them further to communicate the value proposition for me as a potential customer. Why do I care? Why do I need a Jolla smart phone? What makes it so different? Skip the features and tell me how it's going to change my life and the way I do things for the better.

I totally agree with you... and my comment was in no way a praise for their marketing team. I actually couldn't tell from the image if it was a phone or not. I had to actually hunt for the word phone. It could have been an 'iPod Touch' clone.

My first impression, thought Jolla is a user interface skin build on top of Sailfish OS due to the highlight of "gesture based".

Right now there are 50+ comments that all seem to be some variation of 'WTF'. Whose hardware is up & running sailfish? Or is this more vapourware? The page looks pre-launch still...

We'll notify you when Jolla is available to order... [?]

I'm confused too. I don't understand if they are a manufacturer selling the phone directly to customers, or if they are an OEM selling to carriers. It looks like it is different than android, but it runs android apps? Is this another skin for android that is tied to the physical device?

Here, use this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6809444

Not all, it is perfectly possible to read this as saying that a phone running Jolla is capable of running Android apps.

It's entirely possible to interpret the blurb as saying that Jolla is some kind of framework running on an OS called Sailfish, which adds Android compatibility and a gesture-based UI.

For comparison, Nokia's N9 / Meego Harmattan (Jolla Sailfish's predecessor) site from 2011: http://swipe.nokia.com/design/

Nokia made a clearer case for the OS. Jolla's video shows a bunch of rapid-fire tasks that are too hard to follow, and doesn't really showcase the simplicity of the swipe system like Nokia did. There's not enough that's surfaced here to show why you'd choose Jolla over Apple or Google.

We all know how well N9 did in unseating Apple...

Might have done better if MS' trojan horse hadn't cancelled it on release...

I find this kind of comments very funny. If Microsoft had the ability to install their moles as CEOs, why don't they do the same thing to Samsung, Apple, Google, HTC, etc. etc.?

How exactly does one company go about installing their moles as CEOs of other companies? Bribe and blackmail the board members? You're ascribing Microsoft the powers of a comic book supervillain while they cannot even sell a few million Surface RT tablets.

For reference, this is the profile of the chairman of the board. Do you think a bribe from Microsoft is likely to influence this person's decisions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila

>Jorma Jaakko Ollila (born 15 August 1950) is a Finnish businessman, since 1 June 2006, Non-Executive Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell. He was Chairman (1999–2012) and CEO (1992–2006) of Nokia Corporation. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company (2000– ), UPM-Kymmene (1997– ), and Otava Books and Magazines Group Ltd. (1996–). >For Nokia, he was credited with turning the company into the then world's largest handset maker.[1]

>As CEO of Nokia he has led the strategy that restructured the former industrial conglomerate into one of the major companies in the mobile phone and telecommunications infrastructure markets.

So you're telling me that Microsoft somehow bribed that guy, who no doubt would've made tens of millions from turning Nokia into a $100+ bilion dollar company, made him risk everything including national shame and prison time if exposed and seeing the company he built destroyed and hand over the reins to a Microsoft mole?

Or perhaps the Nokia board evaluated their options and wanted Nokia to have the bags of cash from Microsoft which Google reportedly was not willing to supply and save Nokia jobs instead of turning it into another slowly dying RIM and wanted to go Windows Phone, and hired Elop to do the transition. Now, the merits of the decision itself is subject to analysis, doubt and discussion, but the accusations of Elop being a mole derail the discussion that can be had about the Symbian and Blackberry burning platforms.

My conclusion is that a number of people who so strongly seem believe in this idea on tech forums either a) Don't know how CEOs are hired or what a Board of Directors of a company does b) Listen to the conspirational ideas on Slashdot, Groklaw, /r/Android and /r/linux and take it as gospel without thinking it through because the story fits the "Evil M$ kills a Linux OS" victim mentality narrative they want to believe in and they want a 41MP Nokia Android phone real bad c) Jump on the popular anti-MS bandwagon without any rational thought, oh hey, free and easy karma points! d) Believe in the NASA moon hoax too.

That comment says more about the writer than what it says about Elop, how can otherwise smart people succumb to such group thinking?. I haven't found one remotely plausible explanation about how Microsoft installed Elop as the CEO of Nokia. Maybe someone can help me and explain it here, but I am not holding my breath.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

There have been rumours that the Nokia board chairman Ollila would have chosen someone from inside Nokia, but that largest owners of Nokia (some big American funds, who probably own a lot of Microsoft, too) told that this is not acceptable.

One newspaper article (in Finnish) stating this story is here: http://www.itviikko.fi/ihmiset-ja-ura/2011/01/26/kl-elop-ohi...

Hedge fund ownership for the level of influence you're talking about is public information. One can easily compile and compare lists of top hedge fund holders in Microsoft and Nokia.

E.g. the current list of big Nokia holders is here. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nok/institutional-holdings

Microsoft: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/institutional-holdings

Historical data should also be easy to find if someone really wants to look.

The article is in Finnish and seems to be pretty short and not even attempt some basic research for what would be a big story. Even if that were true, what has this got to do with Microsoft executives? The deal certainly didn't raise Microsoft's share price. In fact, Microsoft's share price dropped when the takeover deal was announced, so these alleged hedge funds went from a Nokia share price of $11 before they got Elop hired and ended up with $7 with a low of $1.60(!!!) after influencing the decision to go Windows Phone? Does not make much sense to me.

Again, acting in other's companies' shareholders' interests is illegal for board members, and IIRC punishable by fines and prison time.

Maybe someone from Finland can tell us if the media outlet you referenced is more like the New York Times or a tabloid trying to cash in on a controversy while peddling conspiracy theories.

Here is another article (in Finnish), telling the same story, by Kauppalehti, the largest business-oriented newspaper in Finland.

http://www.kauppalehti.fi/etusivu/elop+ajoi+vanjoen+ohi+kalk...

And the largest holder of Nokia shares has Microsoft as one of their largest holdings...

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nok/institutional-holdings

http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/institutional-portfolio/dodge--...

So between you and me, we uncovered more than the entire Finnish press with a few minutes of web searching?

This is looking more and more like a thread in /r/conspiracy.

Anyway, I don't know what Dodge & Cox achieved if they really influenced anything, Nokia stock went from ~$11 to $1.60 to $8 after the acquisition, and whatever Microsoft share price gained during the same time, it wasn't because of the Nokia acquisition or Windows Phone.

>If Microsoft had the ability to install their moles as CEOs, why don't they do the same thing to Samsung, Apple, Google, HTC, etc. etc.?

It's possible that Microsoft had the ability to "install a mole" to Nokia but not other major cell phone companies.

You're closer to the truth than the conspiracy theorists, but when Elop was hired, Meego was still actually on the table as The Nokia Future. He took it off the table because in his estimation it just wasn't ready. (I worked for Nokia at the time, saw the N9 prototype at the same point in its life he did when he made that call, and he was right. It just wasn't ready.)

And, as a fairly long article in Business Week (I think) detailed a couple years ago, Android was actually the first choice over Windows Phone, but Google and Nokia couldn't come to terms: Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.

Having said all that, I can understand some of the conspiracy mindset around this. Nokia wrote Elop's contract in a way which basically gave him a huge golden parachute if the handset division was sold to someone else, and that really is nuts -- I doubt the intention was to explicitly reward failure, but it's damn easy to paint it that way. But this whole "secret mole" thing? Frankly, whatever one thinks about Microsoft's business practices, I don't think it's plausible that they're really clever enough to pull this off.

> Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.

Can you elaborate? It's hard to understand in light of all the extra cruft the carriers put on their Android devices.

Nokia wanted to use its maps and not Google's, but still be a Google services licensee. That's a no go as far as Google is concerned. Microsoft let Nokia replace its Bing maps with Here, and in fact licensed it as a replacement for the Bing mapping data.

Third party apps on carrier devices that have the Google Play store are in addition to the Google services, not replacing them. The Google services are all there, even if they're hidden.

Would the thing have been feasible if they'd simply bundled Here and kept the Google Maps app on the menu as well? It seems like an odd thing to become a sticking point.

You might as well complain that they are launching in Finland.

You don't seem to understand anything about the context or audience for this phone at the present time.

> You don't seem to understand anything about the context or audience for this phone at the present time.

Neither do I. Since the website didn't, do you care to explain?

It is launching in Finland, do you think it is meant for you to buy it for Mom instead of an iPhone today?

If we don't understand the context or audience it's the fault of the site not the people confused by it.

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

How 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.

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. 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.

> 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

What the heck is that?

Being 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.

Thanks 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.

Please 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.

I'm pretty sure they can't use "Nokia" in their advertisements.

I'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.

I just did experiment and asked my wife what OS is running on her phone. She has no idea. She owns N9.

I 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.

I'm a software developer with 20 years of professional experience, 18 of them on Linux, and 33 years of time spend immersed in technology every day, and I didn't know the N9 ran Meego until I read the paragraph above. I was somewhat aware of Jolla and Sailfish, and vaguely aware it had Linux somewhere there, but only barely.

They probably should not mention the OS very much, and focus on getting people to recognize the brand and reasons why they should want the phones, and only mention "Linux" and "Meego" far down the list.

Stock N9 doesn't even run Meego (proper). It runs Harmattan, a transitional system which is more Maemo than Meego underneath. Nokia planned to evolve it into Meego proper, but never did since it soon sunk into the oblivion of WP. Some parts of Meego (not Harmattan) were forked by the community as Mer, and some other parts (namely Meego Handset) as Nemo. Sailfish is built on Mer and parts of Nemo, adding its own UI on top. All this (including historic evolution of Moblin and Maemo to Meego) can be pretty confusing for those who didn't follow these developments. See also this chart: https://github.com/kumadasu/tizen-history

Yes, 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-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.

Could they parody action movie trailers and say something like "From the engineers who brought you the legendary Nokia N900..."?

How does that help the 'normal people are confused' argument?

To us geeks, yes, but that's still not giving anybody else a single reason to buy the thing.

The first paragraph on a sales page should never include the word "pulseaudio." It probably shouldn't even include "Linux" unless you're selling server hardware.

For that matter, it shouldn't include fork (unless you are talking about the eating utensil), Meego (WTH is that?), Dalvik, etc.

Didn't N900 run Maemo? Also, I'm not even sure N9 ran Meego. If it did, then it was Meego + Nokia's own UI.

As 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).

Did they make the switch to Qt 5 before the release or will the first version ship with Qt 4?

Just found this page: https://sailfishos.org/about-technology.html

They use Qt 5.

They 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.

The 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.

By that reasoning, Android 4.4 obsoleted 4.3.

I'm not going to explain the joke, but Android is backwards compatible.

the joke is that this is what Nokia did almost every time they released a NIT OS (ie maemo) version.

Thank you so much, I couldn't figure out what they were offering exactly. ;-)

For more references, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810555

You 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.

Yeah, 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).

Not 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.

Jolla uses Yandex.Store instead of Google Play. See http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jolla-yandex/

  or the Play Services APIs

Huh. So I can't use any of the Google apps, like gmail?

No, 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.

Wow.

Suddenly I'm interested.

It's important because it's a unique OS. Hardware while innovative, isn't radically different from the rest (except for the other half idea).

Considering the choice of images on their front page, their current target seems to be more niche. Number of open source, Nokia, Maemo/Meego enthusiasts is probably big enough to give their sales a decent start.

Best wishes to Jolla. We truly deserve to have free-as-in-free-speech phones.

I agree. I guessed quickly that it was a phone but all the networking junk it was sitting on top of in the top photo made me wonder if it was supposed to be something else. The first two questions I ask about anything technical (consumer product, programming language, branch of mathematics, ...) are 'what is this?' and 'when would I use this?' and it's depressing how poorly most advertising/documentation answers those.

do you really need it spelled out that it's a phone??

For those who are wondering why this is up on the front page: Jolla is launching their first handset tonight in Helsinki: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/jolla-sailfish-os-phone-...

I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN. To me and from a geek / hacker point of view, Jolla is an awful lot more interesting than Android.

Anyone who's had the chance to own a Meego device knows how incredibly talented and passionate the team behind Jolla is. I'm really looking forward to see how the OS and apps feel on Jolla. The OS also appears to be a lot more open and hackable than Android (although the proof will be in the pudding so we'll see how it all pans out).

Probably hasn't been getting much attention because so far it is vaporware (until you can actually buy a device, it's not all that interesting), and it's a member of the complicated Maemo/Moblin/Meego/Tizen/Mer/Sailfish family that keeps on promising great things but seems to be reinvented every year and never actually delivers a working or supported ecosystem. Yes, a few devices have been released in that family, but have been immediately EOLed (the N900, DOA as it was released just as Nokia decided to go Windows only) or sold only as specialized developer previews or whatnot.

This whole family has been promising lots of things for a long time, but never seems to actually deliver, while you can get an Android phone in any corner store.

I might get interested once I can actually buy a device and write an application for it. Until then, I'm going to be extremely skeptical of this whole family of devices since they seem to consistently over-promise and under-deliver.

> Probably hasn't been getting much attention because so far it is vaporware (until you can actually buy a device, it's not all that interesting

I think having other "Android"-compatible phones out there is very interesting. The more options there are for the consumer, the better off we are. Take a look at the iPhone vs Android scene. If it weren't for other options being available, we'd still be living with 3.5" LCDs and a completely closed-source operating system.

Btw, you could call any product vaporware at some point. (take a look at kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites. most of those products are in some form vaporware, yet lots of people now know the Pebble, Oculus Rift... etc...)

"More options are better for the consumer:" not if you consider fragmentation. While this runs Android apps, it's not clear if it's fully/"acid" compliant and the risk is Sailfish's flavor of Android is a black-sheep stepchild of Android that doesn't always run Android apps properly.

"BTW you can call any product vaporware" - not really. The iPhone wasn't vaporware as it was never officially mentioned before it was released. Android was launched pretty early on with the G1, etc.

> The iPhone wasn't vaporware as it was never officially mentioned before it was released.

iPhone was announced on January 9 2007 and went on sale June 29 the same year.

> I think having other "Android"-compatible phones out there is very interesting.

It would be interesting if I understood what particular problem it solves, which I don't really.

> Sailfish OS, a truly open mobile operating system

Odd, I have a Nokia N9 with Meego in front of me, works perfectly and was cheaper than a similar Android phone. I'm completely aware of this family problems, but you can't say that it hasn't delivered.

The Jolla devs have promised a guide for installing Sailfish OS in this phone, so I will happily make the switch when they publish it.

We are in Hacker News, today you can't find a more hacker-friendly OS for your phone (well, maybe Firefox OS is on par, I haven't used it). I think that's what the parent was talking about.

Sorry, I meant N9 when I said N900 which was earlier. Yes, it was actually released, and I would have been interested in it if it weren't for the fact that they released it right as they cancelled Meego development and switched to Windows. Now there have been several forks of that effort since then, like Sailfish and Tizen, but they haven't actually shipped anything yet, so it's been two years without any real updates.

I agree that it's promising and more hacker friendly than Android. I've been following it for years, and keep thinking "that looks interesting, maybe I'll get one once they've completed their transition to Qt (so I don't start writing GTK apps that will be deprecated soon)" or "maybe I'll get one once they've finished migrating from Maemo to Meego", but every time I do that, there's some new major shift or the project is cancelled or the like.

So, I have some hope for Sailfish, but it's still vaporware as far as actually shipping hardware, and the history of the project and confusing family tree has left me somewhat skeptical, and not willing to spend serious effort on it until it stops being vaporware and someone actually manages to ship a version 2 of the same platform without some complete rewrite of some major component of the platform.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Jolla's first device launches today: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/jolla-sailfish-os-power...

Yes, I was answering the question "I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN." Until today, it has been vaporware. In fact, it's still vaporware as far as I can see; there isn't a "buy" button, there's a "sign up to be emailed when it's ready", though it looks like they are launching in Finland today and the rest of the world later.

As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced, have always been the underdog and have always deeply suffered from the political turmoil happening above their head while they were at Nokia.

One thing they have never been however is vaporware. They have always delivered. And what they've delivered, particularly with Meego, was superb. Meego was especially impressive given that in the last few months before its release, they had for all intent and purpose already been fired from Nokia. That they managed to pull together, keep working on it and release something of that caliber when they knew that Meego had no future at Nokia is pretty incredible.

It's obvious that Jolla is extremely unlikely to ever go mainstream. But that's not the point. They're clearly a team of talented, passionate and persistent hackers that can create products that manage to be delightful to use, open source and very hackable. That's why I find the lack of interest from the HN community, which is usually all over these type of projects, to be surprising.

So, you're right, it hasn't been entirely vaporware. The N800, N900 and N9 did ship, and were pretty impressive.

But when the N900 shipped with Maemo, they then announced that they were changing a large portion of the stack, from GTK to Qt, from dpkg to rpm, from Maemo to MeeGo. So the software stack was pretty much obsolete as soon as it shipped. Then the N9 was released after Nokia had cancelled development on MeeGo, so it was pretty unclear if the platform had any future at all.

Now it's been two more years, and I've heard a lot about Tizen and Mer and Sailfish and Plasma Active and so on, but I haven't actually seen any hardware running them that's generally available.

So yeah, it's pretty impressive what they've done with the resources they have, but I really don't want to invest time and money into a platform that's going to disappear or be reinvented in another year.

The Maemo-MeeGo transition didn't simply replace technical innards; it completely disrupted the Maemo user community, which relationship was negligently bungled by Nokia management. (Although it may also have been due to Intel's influence via the Moblin contingent.) Weep for maemo.org, which once upon a time was the best friend Nokia ever had.

> As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced

Compared with Tizen, FirefoxOS, or Ubuntu Touch, Jolla probably has a bigger and more experienced team.

Tizen has been career Siberia at Samsung, despite all the noise about how Samsung "wants to not depend on Android." Samsung even more wants all the money Android makes for them and are timid about pissing off Google. Samsung and Intel don't communicate well. Until Samsung finally killed their Symbian products (IIRC) about a year ago, more people were working on Symbian at Samsung than on Tizen. Why does Intel need a handset Linux of their own? Answer: they don't, and one day the CEO will notice.

Ubuntu Touch, like many initiatives at Ubuntu, seems tentative. The way Canonical tried to crowdfund a device makes it seem like they have no launch partners.

Firefox OS has a solid team behind it, but they are also dogmatic about it being a Web operating system. They would turn up their noses at having Android compatibility. What if the sweet spot for Web operating systems is Chromebooks? It was tried on handsets once already and failed.

That depends on what people invest in delivering.

The best idea in the world could be sunk by a decision to switch to Windows Phone, and you would judge it as "under-delivery"

It's not a vaporware (unlike Canonical's Edge). It's an actual product in production which is already being sold! Check your facts.

I have been following Jolla for a long time and have owned n900 and the N9. Yes until they actually sell a phone to a real customer it is not being sold. Vaporware is a bit of a strong word but they have come out with many announcements so far and after nearly 2 years there is no product in anyone's hands.

What do you mean? They sold their first 450 handsets today. Although it was a pre-order sales only, but that means something.

They've actually sold many more devices (per-order). What they did now was to deliver the first 450 devices.

I think that ubuntu touch, ubuntu edge and etc get more attention than jolla for no reasons.

> I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN

As a hacker, I want to work on stuff that has a snowball's chance in hell of getting some traction, and in a market with very strong network effects, demonstrating this is up to newcomers. There have been other operating systems for mobile phones that looked cool, but suffered from lack of traction as well.

From the infamous burning platform memo, the rationale for leaving Meego for Windows Phone:

>"The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyze or join an ecosystem."

Jolla's move to support Android apps is to try to mitigate the above effect, but it may lead to the Windows vs. OS/2 scenario where OS/2 ran Windows programs too well, so companies never bothered making native OS/2 apps, after all, why waste precious resources on supporting yet another incompatible platform?

On the other side, as I said in another comment, you have huge companies selling smartphones at or below cost using their profits from other lines of business(Nexus 5, Moto G, Lumia 520(a surprisingly good smartphone for $59 off contract?!!)). They're doing this to either gain marketshare for the ecosystem effects(Microsoft) or as a moat, to sell ads, or to commoditize and reduce Apple's smartphone margins(Google)[1].

Jolla has to compete with these and ultracheap Chinese and India OEMs at the low end and the iPhones, high end Galaxies, Lumias with 41MP cameras and 6" screens, HTC, LG phablets at the high end.

I wish them luck, they need it.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/

On the other hand, one can create Sailfish-native Qt apps that run on Android and iPhone as well. I'm not sure if Qt iOS support is completely ready, but it is something to look forward.

As a hacker I want to work on things which are interesting to me and are in line with my values ;)

There's plenty of free software stuff to work on with Linux that a ton of people use and enjoy. And then there's stuff that, to me at least, seems like a "suicide mission":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko

Bright people, good work, and so on, but it's sad to see something you do go nowhere.

Jolla looks to me better than Openmoko when it comes to adoption chances. And they are doing things right, basing their work on the common middleware (Mer + Nemo). PlasmaActive also uses Mer. They aren't suicide mission, they are a startup with planned strategy and aim to be profitable. Let's see how they fare.

I wish them the best of luck; I was just explaining why as a developer, I'm a bit leery of a new platform like this. I feel for them, as I know it's a very tough spot to be in.

It's tough on one hand, and it's a wild frontier waiting for more pioneers on the other hand, since there is lack of innovation (Android and iOS are pretty much stalled when it comes to introducing new ideas). So newcomers have good chances of providing interesting alternatives. I'd worry more about the sickening patents situation, than about lack of interest in new platforms.

But surely they'll need to attract developers more, since many aren't familiar with Sailfish. There was a recent post about from Mer folks:

http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-sailfishos-co-crea...

> I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN. To me and from a geek / hacker point of view, Jolla is an awful lot more interesting than Android.

Indeed, this is somewhat surprising. And so many people here had no clue what Jolla and Sailfish are.

>Jolla brings you the best of both worlds – super intuitive Sailfish OS apps and the latest Android™ apps.

The recent article on OS/2 [1] makes me wonder whether such compatibility (which, as I understand, is full and not selective) is actually good for them. Either way, tough, I wish Jolla success; I'd like to see Sailfish OS [2] on an actual device.

[1] See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6792010. The short of it is that the Ars Technica article claims OS/2's compatibility with Windows made developers less inclined to write native applications for OS/2. Some discussion on whether that was the case can be found in the comments to this response to the article: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=2144.

[2] https://sailfishos.org/

I think their main focus right now is getting the devices in peoples hands. Do you think compatibility with android would help with this?

I thought of that article too, but I think one of the key differences is that neither OS/2 nor Windows had totally taken over the market when the Windows compatibility was introduced. So it turned the 'what to make apps for' question easy to answer.

The smartphone industry is way beyond that - people are making iOS and Android apps, and very little else.

It's different.

os/2 vs. windows was about two players attempting to prevent each other from monopolizing the industry.

I don't think the Jolla guys go into this with a business plan of one day being a monopoly, or preventing another player from dominating the mobile industry.

Jolla is - I think - about offering consumers what nokia under elop was unwilling to give them: a MeeGo device.

Canonical refused to offer Android emulation for that reason. They didn't think it would be beneficial for Ubuntu Touch in the long term.

IMHO that's right decision. BlackBerry offered Android and it is low value.

Blackberry has a security model that is incompatible with Android's rather liberal model, so every app has to be vetted and sold through Blackberry's app store. That will put a big wet blanket on your Android app availability.

Technologically, Blackberry did a great job.

Technologically, yes, it works, but not always correctly. Users don't like it. That's like public transportation with Ferrari seats claiming Ferrari experience.

> The recent article on OS/2 [1] makes me wonder whether such compatibility (which, as I understand, is full and not selective) is actually good for them.

I would bet it will make Jolla a winner. Android apps will always be new and fresh, even after Microsoft stops throwing money at developers. Jolla will always have a fall-back in case some new popular app takes off.

The problem is you wend up with Jolla simply running a whole load of non-native apps that fail to use the OS to the best of its ability, it can really ruin the perception of an OS if all these swipe gestures etc work in some apps, but not others.

As long as their business is based on selling hardware, it might not be a problem. Then they are not competing with Google in mobile OS development, but with Samsung etc.

Sailfish OS could then allow them to differentiate from other handset makers, without advertising it as such. In other words, market the capabilities, not the Sailfish "brand".

Would Sailfish also run apps that use google play services?

No, not as far I know.

Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimäki went on record last month stating that devices will ship with its own app store partner, Yandex http://store.yandex.com I believe, not Google Play.

So apps consuming Play Services might work if a user was able to install the play services .apk, but I guess this would not be in a supported fashion.

Seems all very murky. Jolla claims full Android compatibility but I don't believe it has Android(™) compatibility. Would be a good developer FAQ.

OS/2 Warp was released in 1994 just before Windows 95 and only supported Windows 3.1 applications. So it was necessary to abandon the OS to use new & upgraded applications designed for Windows 95. At the time, I found OS/2 was much better at running Windows applications as application errors didn't end up causing system instability and the dreaded GPF. I think the analogy would be more accurate if Jolla is unable to support applications designed for KitKat.

One of their implicit pitch is that Jolla is "surveillance free". And it can run Android apps. I think these two features are good enough to spark an interest. The spec looks also impressive. But freedom doesn't come cheap at almost $550. Nonetheless, a very exciting development.

I'm also waiting for Firefox OS to mature and produce more devices.

I can't wait to drop Android. Each release takes more freedom away from the user and gets increasingly integrated with whatever social, cloud, data milking services they have at their disposal.

Funny how freedom becomes a competitive advantage for startups against the big and evil Internet giants.

  One of their implicit pitch is that Jolla is "surveillance free".

Bullshit. Unless the phone can lie to the phone company about which cell tower its connected to, or some magic like that, it's not going to be anything like "surveillance free."

I think he ment that if you want to use the phone, you are not forced to use a ecosystem monitored by USA.

FYI: those who wonder about the technology, check out these sites:

* https://sailfishos.org

* http://merproject.org

* https://wiki.merproject.org

* http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-an...

* http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-an...

Jolla.com is more consumer oriented, so that can puzzle some who look for technical details. It's probably good to provide some links to the above from the Jolla.com. You can give them feedback, they are even present on Diaspora*: https://joindiaspora.com/u/jolla

Perhaps I'm not in the know (I'm not) but it took me way too long to figure out it was a phone and not some UI overlay/Android enhancement suite.

It's like a lot of things that appear on HN... strange and unfamiliar words without context. Yep, a smartphone.

It's the title's fault, OP made no effort to explain what he was linking. Pretty annoying actually.

That'd be editorialising the title which is expressly discouraged by the site moderators.

It would be awesome if Jolla would become a successful company after Nokia sold out to MS (because it seems like Jolla is a continuation of what would have been Nokias route without MS). Also i only heard good things about the N900, i love linux, i hope the handset/os is "free"... and 399€ doesn't seem to be too expensive. Also it looks well designed.

Good luck, Jolla Team!

I think 400 euro is a lot for a device with these specs though. They are letting a huge number of devices "fly under them"(be cheaper) and the average consumer doesn't give a damn if the phone runs Sailfish OS or Android.

Nevertheless, I too wish them luck :)

It really bothers me that they didn't do something about the flickering infrared light in the video. I know it's not going to show up in real life, but that's going to confuse some people who aren't aware of the fact cameras can see some things we don't.

Hint: most global mega corps block youtube. Host videos locally for product demos if you can pay for the bandwidth. You will reach a bigger audience.

Is Vimeo a good alternative, or is it also blocked?

Vimeo is terribly slow, at least from here in India.

What is interesting is that anyone that comes here, likes it (I do from what I see) and goes to check on the Mer Project where this work stems from will see their git repos have been largely untouched for two years. [0] I find that strange because I had to search a few pages into their wiki to even find that URL.

I wish people who liked Meego would support the latest update to the truly free OpenMoko project. [1] You can build your own upgrade or buy the whole thing in an old GA02 case (the second revision OpenMoko phone).

I am waiting out for pocket change to buy one of those. Buy a real open handset and fight the power guys!

[0] http://gitweb.merproject.org/gitweb

[1] http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/

> To get back to Home from any app, swipe from either side of the screen.

I don't think it's a great idea to reserve the "swipe from side of screen" gesture for the OS. Especially the left-swipe is used in many apps to reveal a menu, which is a UI-pattern I like a lot.

Anyway, looks interesting, would love to try one out!

>> "I don't think it's a great idea to reserve the "swipe from side of screen" gesture for the OS."

In iOS 7 a gesture from the left side towards the right navigates back in an app.

Can anyone comment on how free this device will be? From what I recall, Sailfish is partially free software, but contains proprietary software as well which is a real shame.

What is your alternative?

Nemo, replicant, webos? All fully free OSs afaik.

Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch

The Firefox OS phone (Zte Open) has proprietary stuff.

Are there any phones that do not require proprietary drivers? I am not aware of any.

Yes. The most free one is OpenMoko, even the baseband firmware: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2012-July/0672...

(runnig non-certified baseband firmware is illegal in many places however, from spectrum use regulations)

Replicant is the only project committed to software freedom that I know of.

https://sailfishos.org/about-license.html

Our goal with the Sailfish OS is to develop an open source operating system in co-operation with the community, thus ensuring the development of a best-of-breed operating system.

So it looks like the software will be open source. I just hope that the device will not be locked down..

So far there is no detailed information about which packages are free and which aren't. But it should appear fairly soon. I hope community will enumerate non free components.

UPDATE: See this: http://piratepad.net/JollaSoftwareState

Oh, that's a real shame. From glancing at the list it seems like Jolla is still too much thinking in nokia/business/corporate terms. Looks like they just use open source as their platform for their own closed-source stuff..

Looks like everything in the opensource list is open source anyway and everything that jolla did is closed.. So no Jolla for me :(

That's unfortunate, I agree, but they didn't say it will remain like this. It's surely far from what Mozilla does with consistent open development for example, but they still can open up Sailfish in the future. If you compare this to Android - it's already waay better. Having 100% open systems would be ideal of course.

There is also Nemo Mobile, from which Sailfish derives most of the middleware (in addition to Mer). It is fully open. There is an on going work to redesign Nemo UI:

* http://play.qwazix.com/grog/

* http://play.qwazix.com/grog/?p=344

Most probably Nemo will be easily installable on Jolla's handset. Or bootable from an SD card there, without wiping the preinstalled system. So this device is a big milestone for mobile Linux anyway, regardless the shortcomings of the closed parts in Sailfish.

Let's hope so, i guess it remains to be seen how open the device really is.

You can also check the community FAQ here: http://piratepad.net/JollaFAQ

I value my smartphone a lot, but I find it hard to get excited about this smart phone vs that smartphone. Android, Samsung android fork, iPhone, WinPhone, whatever. They're all good, they all roll out a faster better version every year. They all have twitter, facebook, email, maps, search, a camera, app store. etc. Oh yeah, and SMS and voice calls too.

So why should we get excited about this flavour of hand-held connected computer? What's the USP?

Linux ? (not just Linux kernel)

Linux is a good thing, but Linux as a thing in itself delivers a lot of geek cred and is a good platform for other software, but it is not a feature that gives phone users any value. Will the average buyer know or care?

Is it more stable? Cheaper? Android phones are stable and cheap already. Does it run new kinds of apps or run existing apps faster? Make coffee and wash dishes? What does it do for me that my current phone does not?

I absolutely agree with you. Still you have asked personal question "So why should __we__ get excited" and I made assumption that __we__ as hackers. If __we__ as people - IMHO nothing interesting about this phone from average user perspective. N950 and N9 were interesting phones for me as geek (because of QtQuick) but QtQuick performance gain is not that important/significant if compared to HTML(5).

The only reason why I love different brands than Android is to play with something interesting and different. That's why Firefox OS looks particularly interesting for me currently with my simple needs and low dependence on Google.

Good answer, thanks. "real linux" is a feature for a certain group of people. ... as is "low dependence on Google"

Suggestion: add a text "elevator pitch" on a front page.

Forcing me to watch video is a sure way to Ctrl+F4

Yeah, I didn't realize there was more than the video until I read these comments.

Does no-one answer phone calls from their Mom anymore? Just me?

I was very saddened because of this and called my mom immediately with my Android.

Jolla - For people who don't answer to their mothers.

That's a strategy. Not necessarily the best, but strategy at least. I was a little bit lost because they were boasting so much about "Yoyo get Sailfish and you can run Android apps". Like in Blackberry phones before they realized they have to "reclaim their success".

The Peek and Pull features exists on the iPhone - but the directions are reversed.

Changing the directions means that app developers cannot develop the same app for both iOS and Sailfish since they have to place important information that shouldn't be covered up by notifications, or shouldn't be interacted with in a way that could activate the notifications menu, on the bottom in iOS and on the top on Sailfish.

Is there any benefit to changing the directions notifications come from?

The benefit may be not being sued for patent infringement. Sadly.

Developing the same app for both platforms is a Bad Thing. I want Android apps on Android, iPhone apps on iPhone. Mixing never works out well in the long term.

Sure, but realistically not every organisation has the capacity to develop entirely different apps for every platform. And especially not for minority platforms like Jolla.

As a (still happy) n900 user looking for an upgrade path to a decent open phone with modern hardware, I'm hoping that Sailfish gives you command line/root access.

Realistically that probably won't happen in this first iteration, but I've held out for long enough now to be able to wait another 6 months to see what happens. A hardware keyboard would also be nice, the bigger the better, but you can't have it all...

As I recall, there is some talk about using the 'other half' feature of this to attach a hardware keyboard. A quick search reveals:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91535

Ah, I'd misunderstood the 'other half' in that case, thinking it just to be a fancy name for the rear case with a 'colour feature'. There may be hope yet, although nobody seems to know if that command line/root access is possible.

It's entirely possible that the Maemo/Google search queries I've run may be letting me down, it'd be great if the Jolla documentation made some mention of this.

Jukka Eklund tweeted the following: https://twitter.com/jukkaeklund/status/405766972765642752

Seems like the phone already has the command line implemented. Great for them.

I have no idea what the web design of the type Jolla has, but it's getting old really fast. Yes, it looks neat at first, but then it's confusing. Crashplan recently did their update with the same style.

I'll shut up now if I'm the only one bothered by this trend.

I think it's mostly just weird because the fixed header doesn't have a border or anything along the bottom to let you know where it ends and the content begins. I see no reason for it to be fixed at all to be honest, the content isn't extremely useful. I also wish more sites would do min-height media queries before fixing elements to my screen. The header and footer here are pretty greedy with the spacing on this site.

Am I supposed to be impressed by this? "truly open and gesture based OS". I thought the open card has been played and dead already. And don't iOS and Android both have plenty of gestures? I didn't see anything new at all.

Of course they are not selling open software but a hardware product (which may or may not be locked down).

I wonder how the name is pronounced.

My first language is Brazilian Portuguese, but I tend to read it in Spanish because of the double "L". But that in turn would make it sound like the Portuguese version of "cork", like a bottle cork.

"Yol-la" probably confers the intended spelling in English. The word Jolla is Finnish and means a small boat. It's a reference to the famous burning platform memo.

P.S. I was one of the 450 guys who got their phone today. Got it literally 20 minutes ago.

Can you confirm it's got LTE _everywhere_? (6 continents)

I cannot. They didn't really speak about it.

However my first impressions as a developer:

It is a breath of fresh air that instead of fiddling with AndroidSDK and having to deploy an apk my first test of their toolchain was simple compilation -> scp the binary into the phone and run it in dev mode terminal (or via ssh from a desktop).

They naturally have a full fledged packaging system like apk but the point is that it's not forced upon us. My phone is now basically (just like N900 was) just a Linux running on arm platform, with fancy UI for consumer usage on top.

How restricted are you? Can you get root on it?

There are practically no restrictions whatsoever. You have root as soon as you enable the developer mode from options. You can even flash your own images to the device.

I suspect that people in southern California would share your confusion about the pronunciation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jolla

I immediately assumed Hoy-ya. As in the San Diego town La Jolla.

It will be interesting to see if customers see Jolla as a continuation of Nokia's handset business. Lots of people liked N9 and Meego, and when that product was killed it was out-selling Nokia's Windows Phone products.

Weaker than S III hardware to run Android apps for 400 euro? Did I miss something?)

You missed that it is not designed as a lower-cost Android phone?

Why should I buy this device now? 400EUR a lot of money and on Twitter they write: Calendar sync is not supported at the moment. MMS is not supported at the moment. We do not have DLNA support at the moment.

You cannot buy it now, thus... If - I'm speculating - we 'normal' people can buy the device in spring it will have more features.

(I'm interested as it's linux based, and a good alternative to the closed apple world and the dominant 'Android-one-Google-data-collecting' universe.)

The UI is pretty, but it's dropping frames like crazy during your demo video. It's super smooth most of the time, but not at the critical times. Horseshoes and hand grenades, etc.

Anyone else really distracted by the extremely messy desks. Who honestly leaves a wet, browning apple core just sitting on their desk. That's just going to be a sticky bloody mess later.

That's hilarious. Not to knock the phone, which may or may not be quite good, but I was also more interested in the things on the desk than the phone. Who's the person who said, let's put the apple in there? I'd like to know more about that decision as well.

Subliminal message perhaps?

Would be chuckle worthy if it was deliberate.

I thought the desks were a brilliant touch...

>User-replaceable battery

OH. GOD. YES!

I like how the video gives us the heads-up about how easy it is to accidentally hang up on your mother.

While trying to open the video to full size, some was cut off, I found Google's 'Stats for Nerds' on right click. Not expecting that, but gave me a chuckle. As for the phone I don't think it is wise to do promotions with no word on availability.

All I learned from the video is that this is a phone for people with very messy desks.

"A new beginning." And a web site and video that look exactly like every iOS and Android device ever made. For HN readers, there's some geek cred here, but as a consumer product, they need some marketing help.

This is the new beginning after the burning platform company has finally been sold to Microsoft. Alternatively the new beginning for maemo/moblin/meego/whatever.

Liked what i saw. Easily better than any iphone ad of recent times.

OK, all the garbage in the video is really, really strange. It completely distracted me and kind of grossed me out. I don't know who thought that was a good idea.

That looks cool and all but please get Swype on board. I find it an indispensable part of mobile use nowadays and any US without it is seriously missing out.

it will be interesting to see how this competes against the Chinese competitors in this arena. Just yesterday Gionee announced the E7 for about the same price. A phone that includes a camera sensor from a point and shoot.

http://www.gsmarena.com/16mp_gionee_elife_e7_claims_to_be_th...

Looks cool but I wish it had beefier hardware specs.

What are you missing concretely and why?

Just compare it to the Nexus 5 at the same price point. Half the memory, probably lower res screen, the sd card slot is great but I don't think it justifies a $100+ price premium.

I'd rather see Nexus 5's flashed with Ubuntu Phone / Plasma Active / Tizen / Sailfish than all these companies trying to batch order hardware of their own that never has the economies of scale Google could pull off.

You aren't comparing apples to apples. It's pretty clear that Jolla was never intended to launch as a lower-cost competitor to Nexus 5. That makes it a bit silly to criticize it for not being one, particularly at launch. How long has the Android platform had to bring costs down? A long time.

It's unfair to compare a phone hardware company that needs to make money to survive to a company that gets almost all its money from ads, searches, cloud and personal data and uses that money to subsidize hardware as a loss leader(or making bare profits) both to gain marketshare and also to undercut and weaken other smartphone companies' profit margins so that they have less money to compete in web search now or in the future. [1]

From a consumer point of view, you're right though. The market is heading towards commoditization and Jolla will most likely fall into the moat if people compare them on price alone.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/

Why couldn't Ubuntu do that?

Is it because device manufacturers won't put trust in anything but the Android brand?

Finally a great Mobile OS for Python ?

A phone for messy people? Why put so much junk in the video to defocus viewer's attention?

If you know some finish guy, you will definitely understand that this mobile is going to rock.

I'll be getting it as soon as they'll confirm compatibility with T-Mobile LTE.

I really wish we could edit submission titles to be more informative.

> GSM/3G/4G LTE* (Works on 6 continents).

What, no service in Antarctica?

Do we seriously need another mobile operating system?

When does this mobile technology gonna saturate?

mhm..

- FirefoxOS is just web

- Ubuntu Phone is cool and gestures

- Windows Phone is pushed by Microsoft's money

- Jolla / Sailfish is ..

Sorry I don't see a killer feature :(

$400 ? nope.

So I watched the video, and I still have no idea what Jolla is.

I was not impressed by anything in the video, but that's besides the point.

If you're a technology company, this hipster crap is ok, but you need to start with explaining what it is and how it's better. Showing a bunch of gestures does nothing - Android can do that.

You have to click one link on the front page to a short summary of what Jolla is.

One link.

One.

Of, you can just scroll down.

That's it.

is it open source ? Is it unblocked by default (root account) ?

"Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS, a truly open and distinct mobile operating system. Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface and load the phone with top Android™ apps."

I assume you are talking about this? Because that really told me nothing worthwhile.

I wish these (horribly to use scrolling) sites would just give me link that takes me to a half page description that explains in some detail what the heck they are talking about.

What do you mean nothing worthwhile? Isn't that exactly what it is? A phone with an OS that isn't Android/iOS/Windows/Ubuntu/Firefox? What other description are you expecting?

> Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface

What's that? I can turn my Android into a "gesture-based UI".

> load the phone with top Android™ apps

Performance of non-native apps? Emulation layer or what is happening?

> truly open

Every bit is OSS? Hardware specification completely available? What is "truly open".

The phone is supposed to appeal to geeks/hackers (I think?), so why does the whole website seem to be something that Apple could have done?

No it doesn't.

Saying that Jolla is powers by Sailfish OS sais nothing, even if it's a mobile operating system. It could be anything from a book reader to a TV.

Have you tried doing that yourself?

It still doesn't tell me what Jolla is - is it a phone, a phone extension, a new OS, etc?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810555

Kinda off topic, but as soon as I opened that page in a new background tab, it froze my browser and PC for about a minute with an hourglass before it would respond to my inputs. I thought it crashed the system, but everything is okay now. I did close the tab after giving it a cursory look because it looked too noisy and light on content. Perhaps someone can analyze how much RAM, CPU and bandwidth that page takes up. And I am rocking a quadcore computer with 8 gigs of RAM.

Sigh, the more the hardware giveth, the more the new fangled web pages taketh away.

I have an old laptop with Core 2 Duo and 2 gigs of RAM. Had no problem with the website.

i don't know about you but it TRIES to look like ios7, i say LET IT GO - smart-phone business is OWNED by Apple, the sooner we accept that the sooner we can move on to a TRULY different thing - this includes Android too, just DIE you're NOT "original" - instead of coming up with NEW ideas you try to rip-off one another and it's getting annoying [most of the time the company that started the idea WINS]

in summary: - it's a phone [i think] - looks elegant - looks simple to use - it's smart [i think --- am thinking a lot aren't i :)] - android apps [hope it's better in security than Android] - gesture based [OMG, didn't see that one coming]

sound familiar - well it should - iPhone which STARTED all of THIS!

NOTE: am not even an iPhone user, Blackberry [Loyal to the end :)]

CONCLUSION: BORING!

PLEASE if there's something NEW about the OS and the HARDWARE tell me!

So this is an Android fork with UI improvements?

Looks like it isn't a direct Android fork but does use the Android app runtime.

No, this is the current state of Nokia’s Meego OS.

Jolla is based on what was left of Nokia's Maemo/Meego.

It's a phone from a small finnish company with a new (as in not MS, Google or Apple) operating system, that happens to have an Android compatibility layer, so you can run native Sailfish apps and Android apps.

If you happen to have heard of the N900, it's the team who made that one. They founded their own company after Nokia sold its soul to MS.

Nokia had a soul? It was a corporation.

Corporate social responsibility could be thought of as (a part of) a soul of a company.

http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/people-and-planet/st...

It's not a person. Microsoft has statements like that. Why don't they have a soul? I'm actually not trying to be flippant. I think that people need to question their assumptions about "companies as people"...Nokia didn't "have a soul". It was a business. The fact that people think it did reflects more on their marketing than anything else.

Have you seen Hank Poulsen's documentary about precious materials that make it into mobiles? He referred to Nokia as a company that does not do bad and is responsible.

If only to force/guilt-trip companies to do better and be responsible to their workforce, customers, supply chain, country etc., I am going to talk about companies and their soul.

http://bloodinthemobile.org/

OK. Fair enough. That doesn't not make Nokia a sentient entity with "a soul".

It's a business that has a fair degree of social responsibility in its business plans.

My point with this isn't to be pedantic...I'm trying to say that referring to them in this way plays into the larger picture where it is in all businesses interest to have us refer to them as a person. They aren't.

If sustainability and social responsibility reports are what make up (a part of) the soul of a company, Nokia is in good hands.

http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/en-us/re...

You know, I wasn't trying to be a troll. Nokia is a large business that makes money just like other businesses. I think its strange to generalize them the same way that we do people...

Is as much android as BB10, in fact have a lot in common with Blackberry 10 like the user interface or being based on QT/QML for native apps.

If you want, is a maemo/meego fork, with a compatibility layer to run Android apps, and won't be surprised if it runs also Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu Touch apps in some moment.

No, it is a Mer-derived Linux with Qt as the UI toolkit. The OS is called Sailfish.

The Android app capability comes from an Android runtime. I have not tried it myself but the compatibility layer could come from Myriad's "Turbo Dalvik," which is something I heard rumored some time ago, or Jolla might have done it themselves.

My opinion is: "wat"

I was wondering why a condom site was on HN, then I entered and saw it was the mobile phone one...

Too bad for them their name (at least in Brazil) still sounds like a condom name though. (the most popular condom in Brazil is named "Olla")