Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jolla

jolla.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 259 posts

Re: Jolla

#101

Post by pekk »

zanny wrote: post #79
koide wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you missing concretely and why?

Just compare it to the Nexus 5 at the same price point. Half the memory, probably lower res screen, the sd card slot is great but I don't think it justifies a $100+ price premium. I'd rather see Nexus 5's flashed with Ubuntu Phone / Plasma Active / Tizen / Sailfish than all these companies trying to batch order hardware of their own that never has the economies of scale Google could pull off.

You aren't comparing apples to apples. It's pretty clear that Jolla was never intended to launch as a lower-cost competitor to Nexus 5. That makes it a bit silly to criticize it for not being one, particularly at launch. How long has the Android platform had to bring costs down? A long time.

Re: Jolla

#102

Post by msvan »

Brakenshire wrote: post #95
jasonkester wrote: post #44

They seem to put a lot of effort into telling you things other than "what is this thing?" It sorta looks like a phone. Is it a phone? "Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS." Sweet. How is that relevant? It must be important because it spends the rest of the page telling you about the OS. I'm back here, with honestly no idea what it is. Probably not the impression they want to leave on people, assuming (as a guess) that th…

For the people who are genuinely confused, Jolla is a company that sells smartphones, their first smartphone is also called Jolla; it runs Sailfish OS, which is effectively a fork of the Meego operating system which Nokia used in its N9/N900 phones, before they switched to Windows Mobile. This is not very surprising, because Jolla is a Finnish company principally made up of ex-Nokia engineers, including a lot of the…

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.

Re: Jolla

#103

Post by silverbax88 »

Brakenshire wrote: post #95
jasonkester wrote: post #44

They seem to put a lot of effort into telling you things other than "what is this thing?" It sorta looks like a phone. Is it a phone? "Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS." Sweet. How is that relevant? It must be important because it spends the rest of the page telling you about the OS. I'm back here, with honestly no idea what it is. Probably not the impression they want to leave on people, assuming (as a guess) that th…

For the people who are genuinely confused, Jolla is a company that sells smartphones, their first smartphone is also called Jolla; it runs Sailfish OS, which is effectively a fork of the Meego operating system which Nokia used in its N9/N900 phones, before they switched to Windows Mobile. This is not very surprising, because Jolla is a Finnish company principally made up of ex-Nokia engineers, including a lot of the…

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.

Re: Jolla

#104

Post by pekk »

dschiptsov wrote: post #88

Weaker than S III hardware to run Android apps for 400 euro? Did I miss something?)

You missed that it is not designed as a lower-cost Android phone?

Re: Jolla

#105

Post by zokier »

pekk wrote: post #40
davexunit wrote: post #35

Can anyone comment on how free this device will be? From what I recall, Sailfish is partially free software, but contains proprietary software as well which is a real shame.

What is your alternative?

Nemo, replicant, webos? All fully free OSs afaik.

Re: Jolla

#106

Post by shooper »

zanny wrote: post #79
koide wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you missing concretely and why?

Just compare it to the Nexus 5 at the same price point. Half the memory, probably lower res screen, the sd card slot is great but I don't think it justifies a $100+ price premium. I'd rather see Nexus 5's flashed with Ubuntu Phone / Plasma Active / Tizen / Sailfish than all these companies trying to batch order hardware of their own that never has the economies of scale Google could pull off.

It's unfair to compare a phone hardware company that needs to make money to survive to a company that gets almost all its money from ads, searches, cloud and personal data and uses that money to subsidize hardware as a loss leader(or making bare profits) both to gain marketshare and also to undercut and weaken other smartphone companies' profit margins so that they have less money to compete in web search now or in the future. [1]

From a consumer point of view, you're right though. The market is heading towards commoditization and Jolla will most likely fall into the moat if people compare them on price alone.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/

Re: Jolla

#107

Post by luxpir »

Brakenshire wrote: post #83
luxpir wrote: post #70

As a (still happy) n900 user looking for an upgrade path to a decent open phone with modern hardware, I'm hoping that Sailfish gives you command line/root access. Realistically that probably won't happen in this first iteration, but I've held out for long enough now to be able to wait another 6 months to see what happens. A hardware keyboard would also be nice, the bigger the better, but you can't have it all...

As I recall, there is some talk about using the 'other half' feature of this to attach a hardware keyboard. A quick search reveals: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91535

Ah, I'd misunderstood the 'other half' in that case, thinking it just to be a fancy name for the rear case with a 'colour feature'. There may be hope yet, although nobody seems to know if that command line/root access is possible.

It's entirely possible that the Maemo/Google search queries I've run may be letting me down, it'd be great if the Jolla documentation made some mention of this.

Re: Jolla

#108

Post by ye »

thomholwerda wrote: post #34
ye wrote: post #27

So I watched the video, and I still have no idea what Jolla is. I was not impressed by anything in the video, but that's besides the point. If you're a technology company, this hipster crap is ok, but you need to start with explaining what it is and how it's better. Showing a bunch of gestures does nothing - Android can do that.

You have to click one link on the front page to a short summary of what Jolla is. One link. One. Of, you can just scroll down. That's it.

Have you tried doing that yourself?

It still doesn't tell me what Jolla is - is it a phone, a phone extension, a new OS, etc?

Re: Jolla

#109

Post by lambda »

Shamanmuni wrote: post #78
lambda wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably hasn't been getting much attention because so far it is vaporware (until you can actually buy a device, it's not all that interesting), and it's a member of the complicated Maemo/Moblin/Meego/Tizen/Mer/Sailfish family that keeps on promising great things but seems to be reinvented every year and never actually delivers a working or supported ecosystem. Yes, a few devices have been released in that family, bu…

Odd, I have a Nokia N9 with Meego in front of me, works perfectly and was cheaper than a similar Android phone. I'm completely aware of this family problems, but you can't say that it hasn't delivered. The Jolla devs have promised a guide for installing Sailfish OS in this phone, so I will happily make the switch when they publish it. We are in Hacker News, today you can't find a more hacker-friendly OS for your phon…

Sorry, I meant N9 when I said N900 which was earlier. Yes, it was actually released, and I would have been interested in it if it weren't for the fact that they released it right as they cancelled Meego development and switched to Windows. Now there have been several forks of that effort since then, like Sailfish and Tizen, but they haven't actually shipped anything yet, so it's been two years without any real updates.

I agree that it's promising and more hacker friendly than Android. I've been following it for years, and keep thinking "that looks interesting, maybe I'll get one once they've completed their transition to Qt (so I don't start writing GTK apps that will be deprecated soon)" or "maybe I'll get one once they've finished migrating from Maemo to Meego", but every time I do that, there's some new major shift or the project is cancelled or the like.

So, I have some hope for Sailfish, but it's still vaporware as far as actually shipping hardware, and the history of the project and confusing family tree has left me somewhat skeptical, and not willing to spend serious effort on it until it stops being vaporware and someone actually manages to ship a version 2 of the same platform without some complete rewrite of some major component of the platform.

Re: Jolla

#110

Post by Brakenshire »

msvan wrote: post #102
Brakenshire wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the people who are genuinely confused, Jolla is a company that sells smartphones, their first smartphone is also called Jolla; it runs Sailfish OS, which is effectively a fork of the Meego operating system which Nokia used in its N9/N900 phones, before they switched to Windows Mobile. This is not very surprising, because Jolla is a Finnish company principally made up of ex-Nokia engineers, including a lot of the…

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.

Post reply on HN