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Comment by davegardner | Hacker News Reader

Strong demand for a crowdfunding campaign perhaps. However it's really a drop in the ocean if you compare their 18k funders to the estimated 259 million tablets that'll be sold in 2016.

Edit: I jumped a year ahead. A better comparison would be to the 233.4 million that are estimated for 2015.

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It's indeed a mere droplet among total tablet sales. But given the obscurity of Jolla, it's surprisingly strong demand for something not being provided by other tablets. This could mean that slowing demand may due to current tablets, not the tablet market itself.

Jolla's tablet has 18,000 funders.

If we assume that there are at least 2 million Linux enthusiasts in the world, 10% of them have heard of Jolla, and 10% of those are willing to spend disposable income on a new kind of Linux device... That gives you a market of 20k people.

So I'm not convinced that Jolla really offers anything compelling to anyone else except a subset of Linux fans.

Their top feature being promoted is "privacy". That's a property of their business model rather than technology, one which could be of interest to more than a subset of Linux fans. Time will tell if Jolla can keep Linux invisible to users.

It's not clear that "privacy" and "Google Android" are compatible, unless you go to Cyanogen and dump all Google services.

In theory, Sailfish could sandbox/isolate native app data from the compatibility layer which runs Android apps. Whether they will expose a sufficiently granular policy/management API is an open question.

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