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Jolla

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Re: Jolla

#111

Post by shooper »

davidw wrote: post #48
MehdiEG wrote: post #24

For those who are wondering why this is up on the front page: Jolla is launching their first handset tonight in Helsinki: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/jolla-sailfish-os-phone-... I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN. To me and from a geek / hacker point of view, Jolla is an awful lot more interesting than Android. Anyone who's had the chance to own a Meego device knows how incredibly t…

> I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN As a hacker, I want to work on stuff that has a snowball's chance in hell of getting some traction, and in a market with very strong network effects, demonstrating this is up to newcomers. There have been other operating systems for mobile phones that looked cool, but suffered from lack of traction as well.

From the infamous burning platform memo, the rationale for leaving Meego for Windows Phone:

>"The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyze or join an ecosystem."

Jolla's move to support Android apps is to try to mitigate the above effect, but it may lead to the Windows vs. OS/2 scenario where OS/2 ran Windows programs too well, so companies never bothered making native OS/2 apps, after all, why waste precious resources on supporting yet another incompatible platform?

On the other side, as I said in another comment, you have huge companies selling smartphones at or below cost using their profits from other lines of business(Nexus 5, Moto G, Lumia 520(a surprisingly good smartphone for $59 off contract?!!)). They're doing this to either gain marketshare for the ecosystem effects(Microsoft) or as a moat, to sell ads, or to commoditize and reduce Apple's smartphone margins(Google)[1].

Jolla has to compete with these and ultracheap Chinese and India OEMs at the low end and the iPhones, high end Galaxies, Lumias with 41MP cameras and 6" screens, HTC, LG phablets at the high end.

I wish them luck, they need it.

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

Re: Jolla

#112

Post by geuis »

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…

Please forward this paragraph to their web folks. Just put it right at the top as a first-read. Then everything else makes a lot more sense.

Re: Jolla

#113

Post by sharpneli »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #82

I wonder how the name is pronounced. My first language is Brazilian Portuguese, but I tend to read it in Spanish because of the double "L". But that in turn would make it sound like the Portuguese version of "cork", like a bottle cork.

"Yol-la" probably confers the intended spelling in English. The word Jolla is Finnish and means a small boat. It's a reference to the famous burning platform memo.

P.S. I was one of the 450 guys who got their phone today. Got it literally 20 minutes ago.

Re: Jolla

#114

Post by lambda »

MehdiEG wrote: post #81
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…

As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced, have always been the underdog and have always deeply suffered from the political turmoil happening above their head while they were at Nokia. One thing they have never been however is vaporware. They have always delivered. And what they've delivered, particularly with Meego, was superb…

So, you're right, it hasn't been entirely vaporware. The N800, N900 and N9 did ship, and were pretty impressive.

But when the N900 shipped with Maemo, they then announced that they were changing a large portion of the stack, from GTK to Qt, from dpkg to rpm, from Maemo to MeeGo. So the software stack was pretty much obsolete as soon as it shipped. Then the N9 was released after Nokia had cancelled development on MeeGo, so it was pretty unclear if the platform had any future at all.

Now it's been two more years, and I've heard a lot about Tizen and Mer and Sailfish and Plasma Active and so on, but I haven't actually seen any hardware running them that's generally available.

So yeah, it's pretty impressive what they've done with the resources they have, but I really don't want to invest time and money into a platform that's going to disappear or be reinvented in another year.

Re: Jolla

#115

Post by jaredmcateer »

pekk wrote: post #98
eric_cc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't seem to understand anything about the context or audience for this phone at the present time. Neither do I. Since the website didn't, do you care to explain?

It is launching in Finland, do you think it is meant for you to buy it for Mom instead of an iPhone today?

If we don't understand the context or audience it's the fault of the site not the people confused by it.

Re: Jolla

#117

Post by matt_kantor »

lambda wrote: post #109
Shamanmuni wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 update…

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Jolla's first device launches today: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/jolla-sailfish-os-power...

Re: Jolla

#118

Post by k-mcgrady »

CookWithMe wrote: post #45

> To get back to Home from any app, swipe from either side of the screen. I don't think it's a great idea to reserve the "swipe from side of screen" gesture for the OS. Especially the left-swipe is used in many apps to reveal a menu, which is a UI-pattern I like a lot. Anyway, looks interesting, would love to try one out!

>> "I don't think it's a great idea to reserve the "swipe from side of screen" gesture for the OS."

In iOS 7 a gesture from the left side towards the right navigates back in an app.

Re: Jolla

#119

Post by ender7 »

The UI is pretty, but it's dropping frames like crazy during your demo video. It's super smooth most of the time, but not at the critical times. Horseshoes and hand grenades, etc.

Re: Jolla

#120

Post by LiamMcCalloway »

sharpneli wrote: post #113
rodolphoarruda wrote: post #82

I wonder how the name is pronounced. My first language is Brazilian Portuguese, but I tend to read it in Spanish because of the double "L". But that in turn would make it sound like the Portuguese version of "cork", like a bottle cork.

"Yol-la" probably confers the intended spelling in English. The word Jolla is Finnish and means a small boat. It's a reference to the famous burning platform memo. P.S. I was one of the 450 guys who got their phone today. Got it literally 20 minutes ago.

Can you confirm it's got LTE _everywhere_? (6 continents)
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