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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.

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.

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/

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

> I think that might partly explain the advertising, they seem to be modelling themselves on that Central/Northern European, Berlin counter-culture, Girl-with-a-Dragon-Tattoo, techy-savvy hacker kind of thing.

What the heck is that?

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.

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

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

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.

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).

  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.