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Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

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Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#41

Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless. 1. They have no production as of yet. 2. They have no carrier partners as of yet. 3. They have a retail partner who will sell the ph…

Where do you collect your facts? I'm not even sure if you don't have bad intentions with your comment. It would be nice from your side to state your relation to Jolla (e.g. competitor)

1. Headline was written by journalist not by Jolla. OK I got it wrong. You are negative to journalist, right?

2. You are most probably right about production but you simply don't know. You are wrong about carrier partners: they have one in Finland (http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/11/21/jolla-signs-first-ca...) and one in China.

2. Europeans can get subsidized phones but don't have to. You can use any phone if you manage to get one. I even used one phone that is not for production just fine (N950).

3. I doubt that lock is an issue here. You basically can reflash your phone with pure OS if you want to - like you can reflash your N9 with Mer now.

4. I almost agree with you regarding patents but idea is that Jolla has its own patent portfolio gifted to them by Nokia.

5. Hurmola according to LinkedIn still works for Jolla. As well they are not hiding why CEO was changed - they are quite transparent regarding that. Sorry, but don't find that now.

I'm not related to Jolla in any way. I'm (mobile) developer who believes that Jolla will succeed.

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're still releasing some Maemo phones, afaik, no? All in all, being a Microsoft hater or not, I believe it was a good move, though. Symbian was an old messy pile, and Maemo was just... bad.

If they are releasing any more Maemo phones (and I'm not sure they are), it's just a few last devices they had in the pipeline. At this point they've already decided that Maemo shall have no future.

To be technically correct we can speak only about MeeGo device N9. It's support is discontinued from 2013 but you can still buy one if you find it. Overall very nice device. As well I must say it is quite popular compared to Symbian devices.

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#43

No way. The UI is a gimmick. Watch the video. 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…

>"when is that useful?" I would like to be able to listen to youtube music videos while doing other tasks.

Then you will love BB10. At least you can do this on PlayBook therefore I believe BB10 will allow that as well.

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#44
post #18

"...a real alternative to iPhone and Android" There is something about this title that just incites a negative reaction from me. To me, it implies that the current available options are broken beyond repair and that a "savior" is coming to liberate us from them, and boy... do I hate self-proclaimed saviors, especially in the tech area. Android/iPhone/WP7/Mozilla OS/$xyz are the options we have, and we don't need a re…

I guess headlines was written by journalist anyway. Actually you try to read more from headline than it actually states.

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#45

They aim to crack China and their reasoning is that the big players haven't got a foothold yet due to being a young-ish market. 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.

"China where 99.9% people steal." That's a pretty sweeping statement not to be backed by a source with a figure even remotely resembling 99.9%.

Source: A friend IOS App collecting analytics data. Sure, I could make it up but that is the data he got back.

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"China where 99.9% people steal." That's a pretty sweeping statement not to be backed by a source with a figure even remotely resembling 99.9%.

Source: A friend IOS App collecting analytics data. Sure, I could make it up but that is the data he got back.

Right and 99.9% of chinese run iOS... A more likely answer is you are just Racist.

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#47
post #28

I really think these tile widgets are not useful or easy to understand for an average user. Apple has it right: iOS is just an app launcher, and there is just one tier of apps, none of this widget-y stuff. I will note that small read-only changes can be beneficial to the user (calendar shows current day in icon), but I wouldn't dare make someone try and interact with that.

Well, why everyone should please "average user"?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2012/07/21/finlands-j...

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#48

Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless. 1. They have no production as of yet. 2. They have no carrier partners as of yet. 3. They have a retail partner who will sell the ph…

> It's also my understanding that Europeans don't necessarily get subsidized phones, either—but they still (nominally) control which phones are allowed on their networks.

Europe is not a nation. It differs from country to country. Sweden has both subsidized and no contract phones.

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#49

Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless. 1. They have no production as of yet. 2. They have no carrier partners as of yet. 3. They have a retail partner who will sell the ph…

> It's also my understanding that Europeans don't necessarily get subsidized phones, either—but they still (nominally) control which phones are allowed on their networks. Europe is not a nation. It differs from country to country. Sweden has both subsidized and no contract phones.

Thank you for stating the obvious. This is why I said "…don't necessarily get…".

I knew it would vary from country to country and carrier to carrier. The original article suggested that China was different because the phones were bought without subsidy. In reality, it's not that different because a phone subsidy isn't guaranteed in European mobile markets. All I was doing here is calling out the laziness of the so-called journalist.

Re: Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

#50
post #41

Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless. 1. They have no production as of yet. 2. They have no carrier partners as of yet. 3. They have a retail partner who will sell the ph…

Where do you collect your facts? I'm not even sure if you don't have bad intentions with your comment. It would be nice from your side to state your relation to Jolla (e.g. competitor) 1. Headline was written by journalist not by Jolla. OK I got it wrong. You are negative to journalist, right? 2. You are most probably right about production but you simply don't know. You are wrong about carrier partners: they have on…

I have no relation to Jolla at all—neither competitor or likely customer. At the moment, I'm not doing any direct mobile development (we will be offering something for mobile in the future, but this is not affected by the existence or absence of Jolla). My entire relationship with Jolla is reading this nonsensical article and writing my comment with a bit of simple (short) research.

1. Yes, the journalist (or his editor) is lazy here. However, they probably wouldn't cast the article in such a stark light without prompting from Jolla.

2a. Happy to admit that I was wrong here; the article contained no information about these relationships, and Jolla’s website is essentially content free.

2b. I addressed this (mostly) in a reply to a sibling comment. My point here was that (again) the journalist was lazy-to-irresponsible for pretending that China is different because of the lack of subsidy.

3. Unless Jolla exerts some control over the handset manufacturer and/or the carriers that offer Sailfish phones, which Jolla has explicitly said that they aren't going to do, users will not (necessarily) have the freedom to reflash their phone. This is the problem with Android: there have been both manufacturer locks and carrier locks that prevent timely receipt of updates (including security updates) or OS management of your own phone. You have to root and/or jailbreak your phone to make this happen, and some phones actively fight that (e.g., one of the Motorola phones that I remember a big stink about).

4. Having a nice set of defensive patents gifted by Nokia (hopefully it's done properly so they can use them for defence, rather than merely having a licence to them) is useful, but is not the same as the claim in the article that the are immune to any existing patents. Some of the claims made by Samsung regarding radios clearly indicate that this is not the case.

5. I looked for the CEO change info on Jolla's remarkably content-free website. I couldn't find it. Hurmola's relationship to Jolla (as noted on LinkedIn) is limited to being on the board, as the transition notes that I did find was related to looking after the Sailfish ecosystem. What I found interesting is that it's not clear to me how long Hurmola was CEO—and again, there's remarkably little information. Regardless of why the change was done, I'd be a little skeptical as a partner about the changes at the top with as little transparency as they exhibit.

I'm neither positive nor negative toward Jolla itself: I think it will fail, but I don't want them to fail. I'm deeply negative to this horrendously awful uncritical article. It's roughly the equivalent of a news report from Fox News, CNBC, or cnet, or an analysis by Rob Enderle.

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