[serbanescu]

First Jolla smartphone from former Nokia staff just went on sale

The device sports a fairly mid-range specification, with a 1.4GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor, 1GB memory and 16GB of flash storage, plus a 4.5in 960x540 in-plane switching (IPS) touchscreen with Gorilla 2 Glass.

It has the usual mobile network support, including GSM/3G/4G support that is good across 6 continents, 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth, 8MP autofocus rear camera and 2MP front camera. SIM-free pricing is expected to be €399 (about �330).

The specs are not top of the line, but according to Washington Post -

Its first own device is intended as a reference product, to show what the company’s operating system is capable of. “This is a product where our company can introduce our idealistic views on how we believe the mobile phone should be,” Antti Saarnio, Jolla’s chairman and co-founder, said in an interview.

They intend to licence the Sailfish OS to other manufacturers.

Of course, they have an app gap too and, like BlackBerry / BB10, patched it with Android apps -

To make sure users can access thousands of applications from the start, Jolla made the phone compatible with Android apps sold through Yandex NV, a Russian rival to Google.

My question is: what can make them better than BlackBerry? I cannot see them succeed where BlackBerry struggles.
Anyone here belives in their success? What are your reasons?

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[Bold_until_Hybrid_Comes]

Not going to do well at least for now. Even in comparison to BB10. Little to no carrier support, especially in North America.

Yandex uses APK files I believe so they may get a lot of apps fast as well

[Galifrey]

Their primary market atm is their native country and souround nations in scandiavia, russia and china. ATM they are doing great for as they are hugly popular locally. Commercial success outside in central europe and the americas will definitely be hard (carrier support).

As for their OS, it's one of the best OS I've ever seen. Much of BB10 os came from meeo and webos. Sailfish from meamo is a huge step up from that. If only it had a hub.....

[kbz1960]

Too little too late? And if android mfg's aren't allowed to make BB10 phones due to the forked android player they shouldn't be able to make a phone for them either. Same thing?

[Saiga]

I can name at least one thing Jolla is doing better than BlackBerry so far - the marketing.

That "A New Beginning" video is better than anything BlackBerry has ever put out. It made me more excited to get a Sailfish device and it actually shows the product instead of rubber duckies and elephant legs.

[propeller10]

Personally, I think BB 10 looks more intuitive and communication is well integrated. Jolla looks promising as well. It looks beautiful.

[howarmat]

the biggest difference is they are a staff of under 100 people I think and they arent even trying to sell numbers like BB wants for bb10. They have a nice OS that i wouldnt mind playing around with but probably not for a daily driver. I think they had a very good base with meego and expanded upon. I am a little shocked at the cost of the phones as I thought these were suppose to be under 400 USD

[eldricho]

The Meego community is jumping fast on this one. I don't see them getting a ton of users in record time, but they'll get enough to atleast make profit on the first few batches
Small company that doesn't look to be aiming for numbers

Posted via CB10

[ElGusta]

I can name at least one thing Jolla is doing better than BlackBerry so far - the marketing.

That "A New Beginning" video is better than anything BlackBerry has ever put out. It made me more excited to get a Sailfish device and it actually shows the product instead of rubber duckies and elephant legs.

Very true, this jolla made video takes a massive wet dump all over anything BB has ever made.

[Oofa]

I don't see anything new or even improved. It looks like nothing more than one of a thousand weird and whacky launchers from the Android market. Maybe you have to use it or have someone explain why it's different in order to see anything that makes it in any way better than what anyone else offers. I applaud anyone trying to elbow their way into the OS market but if they don't make it available at a very inexpensive price to the U.S. market, they will never get off the ground. I do wish them luck.

[VR6]

Just watched some demos and I have to say it looks the the love child of Windows phone and BB10. UI and font look like WP and gestures and peak from BB10.

It's not as easy to use as BB10 though because it turns everything on its ear and sideways swipes return to home??

Also too complicated as there are gestures overtop of active "covers". Too much.

Fired from my Z10

[Galifrey]

There's a reason for that VR6. It's b/c windows phone (nokian) and BB10 all copied from Jolla/Meego.

I can name at least one thing Jolla is doing better than BlackBerry so far - the marketing.

That "A New Beginning" video is better than anything BlackBerry has ever put out. It made me more excited to get a Sailfish device and it actually shows the product instead of rubber duckies and elephant legs.

Their #unlike campaign, and I am the first one T-shirt etc., as well as marketing event at startup cons (slush etc) have been much more effective than whatever BB has churned out.

[mnc76]

The Meego community is jumping fast on this one. I don't see them getting a ton of users in record time, but they'll get enough to atleast make profit on the first few batches
Small company that doesn't look to be aiming for numbers

Posted via CB10

How big is the Meego community?

Posted via CB10

[bobo616]

I think it has a lot of potential and bb10 could borrow a few ideas but there are so many questions about their software that I think this is really just for the very early adopters at this time but I wish them luck.

More OS choices is a good thing.

Posted via CB10

[serbanescu]

It looks like nothing more than one of a thousand weird and whacky launchers from the Android market.

Just watched some demos and I have to say it looks the the love child of Windows phone and BB10. UI and font look like WP and gestures and peak from BB10.

It's not as easy to use as BB10 though because it turns everything on its ear and sideways swipes return to home??

Also too complicated as there are gestures overtop of active "covers". Too much.

Fired from my Z10

I find it confusing too - but I must say I had never used a Jolla phone. On the other hand, BB10 seems pretty straightforward to me, despite having some minor inconsistencies of its own (mainly in the way the app menus are implemented).

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[serbanescu]

And one other thing:

I'm really curious about the Android player in Sailfish OS and how it compares with what BlackBerry engineers had developed for BB 10.2.1

I am not familiar with the matter, but I believe Sailfish Android player has the potential of being better because the OS runs on a Linux kernel - so (in theory) Android apps containing native code should work without the problems they have on current BB10 versions (pre BB 10.2.1).

Maybe someone in the know could explain it better for the rest of us who know little about these operating systems.

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[AluminiumRims]

The UI looks very nice and Jolla will have Here Maps (former Nokia maps) pre-installed which is something very attractive for me.

This first device is pretty low spec and the display is low resolution today for that size. I can forgive them as this is their first device and it also mirrors the specs of the Nokia N9 which is the unit where Meego was developed on. Now, on later models they must increase the resolution, otherwise they will end up in the same dead end as Symbian. For many manufacturers including Blackberry and Jolla, is the resolution scaling a major factor how they can adapt to different hardware platforms. Blackberry has limit themselves to two specific resolutions which is something I think is a really bad strategy. They must be able to use any resolution in order to be able to scale to any display.

The question is how Jolla is going to adapt to this and if they can scale to different HW better than Blackberry, then Jolla is technically a better alternative.

[serbanescu]

For many manufacturers including Blackberry and Jolla, is the resolution scaling a major factor how they can adapt to different hardware platforms. Blackberry has limit themselves to two specific resolutions which is something I think is a really bad strategy. They must be able to use any resolution in order to be able to scale to any display.

The question is how Jolla is going to adapt to this and if they can scale to different HW better than Blackberry, then Jolla is technically a better alternative.

Developing for multiple screen resolutions / screen densities / screen formats is a nightmare, made worse when supporting multiple languages. Apple apps have beautiful UIs because developers can optimize them for only a handful of devices.

In my opinion BlackBerry is doing the right thing by limiting the number of devices on offer. More devices would imply higher costs for native app development - not a good thing when the market on which you sell your apps is so tiny.

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[AluminiumRims]

Developing for multiple screen resolutions / screen densities / screen formats is a nightmare, made worse when supporting multiple languages. Apple apps have beautiful UIs because developers can optimize them for only a handful of devices.

In my opinion BlackBerry is doing the right thing by limiting the number of devices on offer. More devices would imply higher costs for native app development - not a good thing when the market on which you sell your apps is so tiny.

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It's a challenge to support many different resolutions but it has to be done in some orderly fashion. What would happen if Windows only supported a few resolutions? Would we be stuck at 800x600 screens? Android does support most resolutions and I'm not sure what kind of measures you need to do as an application developer to support this.

Supporting only a few resolutions will lead to that get painted into a corner just like Symbian that couldn't scale beyond 640x360.

[serbanescu]

It's a challenge to support many different resolutions but it has to be done in some orderly fashion. What would happen if Windows only supported a few resolutions? Would we be stuck at 800x600 screens? Android does support most resolutions and I'm not sure what kind of measures you need to do as an application developer to support this.

Supporting only a few resolutions will lead to that get painted into a corner just like Symbian that couldn't scale beyond 640x360.

I realize my comment was not clear enough.

BlackBerry 10 OS can support other resolutions too, higher than the current ones, the OS is fine.

My point was that catering for a screen-fragmented market increases development costs and may result in inferior experiences for some users. A beautiful & well balanced, functional UI must preserve some proportions between its elements, and those proportions cannot always be maintained across a wide variety of screen sizes / densities / formats and languages supported.

This being the case, I strongly believe that a limited amount of screen formats results in lesser development costs, optimized UIs and a more consistent user experience.

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[David Murray1]

omg, just what the world needs - Yet Another OS -.-

[sjmartin007]

Thing I noticed in this new OS is everything I saw is not really new it looks like a modified version of android and windows. It could be better but can't tell until I can try the OS out.

Posted from the most powerful smartphone,z10

[eldricho]

omg, just what the world needs - Yet Another OS -.-

Dude, don't think like that.. That's the same way some people seem to think of WP and BlackBerry

Posted via CB10

[SuperionMaximus]

And one other thing:

I'm really curious about the Android player in Sailfish OS and how it compares with what BlackBerry engineers had developed for BB 10.2.1

I am not familiar with the matter, but I believe Sailfish Android player has the potential of being better because the OS runs on a Linux kernel - so (in theory) Android apps containing native code should work without the problems they have on current BB10 versions (pre BB 10.2.1).

Maybe someone in the know could explain it better for the rest of us who know little about these operating systems.

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Android isn't really Linux. It just uses a heavily modified version of the Linux Kernel as the base system. But for the most part, the Linux community and Google haven't been able to come together much towards the goal of a unified code base. There is conjecture as to whether or not Android should be considered a Linux Distribution as it does not support may common Linux tools. So really, using a modified Linus Kernel vs QNX Neutrino doesn't really give Android a leg up over BlackBerry 10.

Both Linux and QNX Neutrino are POSIX compliant Unix-like operating systems. One is open source, the other is closed source. Linux is a monolithic kernel architecture, QNX Neutrino is a micro kernel architecture. For the most part they can both execute the same UNIX commands just fine.

But that's just the base system, not the part we interact with on either Android or BlackBerry 10.

In Android, the application layer and UI/UX are built primarily with Java, just like Legacy BlackBerry OS.

BlackBerry 10 uses OpenGL and Qt to build the UI/UX and native apps are written in C/C++. But BlackBerry 10 also supports a wide variety of open source and closed source development tools like Adobe Air, HTML 5 Android Java etc.

In a nutshell, BlackBerry 10's Android runtime environment can run native Android apps as well as Android or anything else on the market.

[AluminiumRims]

Android isn't really Linux. It just uses a heavily modified version of the Linux Kernel as the base system.

I wouldn't use the word "heavily" here. There are some additions to the kernel but that many.