Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

Seeing him use it does not lead me to believe this will make my life better at all. There are far too many intricate gestures and complex interactions.

This UI does not solve any problems. The interactive tiles that are essentially miniature versions of the full app are just noisy. Part of the beauty of this new mobile experience that recent smartphones have cultivated is modal interaction. One app for one thing. I launch my music app and it's full screen with large touch buttons that are easy to use. I switch to another app to immerse myself in reading or responding to emails.

I never need to do this from my homescreen, let alone see or interact with all of it at once.

The ambient photo stuff is neat but also entirely useless.

Nothing about this is radical. It's just a layer of more playful paint on yet another mobile platform.

Why is everyone so fucking concerned with multitasking?

My android-fanboy buddy showed me something the other day that made me chuckle. He says, "dude, look at this." He proceeded to load a video from the media library, and started to play it in some kind of picture-in-picture mode where it was floating above everything else on the phone. Then he tells me, "how cool is this?! you can use your phone while the video plays." my simple response, to which he had no answer: "when is that useful?" It's not! And he proceeded to admit that, albeit with his tail between his legs. I didn't say that to be an asshole, I just think that these days people are far too excited about gimmicks and useless customizations. He then went on to say something like "well what about if you want to watch a youtube video and also reply to some text messages?" ... society is doomed.

Unless they are releasing it for free too then I doubt they will overtake Android in China.

There's a lot of options on the mobile space already (iOS, Android and WM8) - which, IMHO is enough (not to mention BB, FirefoxOS, WebOS, Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia)...

At the same time they are looking to developers to create native apps for it and hardly anyone is going to develop for a phone if their primary market is China where 99.9% people steal.