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Jolla

jolla.com

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Re: Jolla

#171

Post by erikig »

daliusd wrote: post #155
zobzu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they can say jolla is the phone, sailfish the os, and that it comes from meego tho. and everything else without mentioning even Nokia. heh.

I just did experiment and asked my wife what OS is running on her phone. She has no idea. She owns N9.

I think the idea of the site was to get the name jolla out there and to get consumers asking: what is a jolla?

I believe from the questions above they've succeeded. If they just said, hey there's another phone called jolla I doubt I'd have taken a look.

Re: Jolla

#172

Post by davidw »

shmerl wrote: post #170
davidw wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of free software stuff to work on with Linux that a ton of people use and enjoy. And then there's stuff that, to me at least, seems like a "suicide mission": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko Bright people, good work, and so on, but it's sad to see something you do go nowhere.

Jolla looks to me better than Openmoko when it comes to adoption chances. And they are doing things right, basing their work on the common middleware (Mer + Nemo). PlasmaActive also uses Mer. They aren't suicide mission, they are a startup with planned strategy and aim to be profitable. Let's see how they fare.

I wish them the best of luck; I was just explaining why as a developer, I'm a bit leery of a new platform like this. I feel for them, as I know it's a very tough spot to be in.

Re: Jolla

#173

Post by shooper »

sampo wrote: post #165
shooper wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this kind of comments very funny. If Microsoft had the ability to install their moles as CEOs, why don't they do the same thing to Samsung, Apple, Google, HTC, etc. etc.? How exactly does one company go about installing their moles as CEOs of other companies? Bribe and blackmail the board members? You're ascribing Microsoft the powers of a comic book supervillain while they cannot even sell a few million Surfa…

There have been rumours that the Nokia board chairman Ollila would have chosen someone from inside Nokia, but that largest owners of Nokia (some big American funds, who probably own a lot of Microsoft, too) told that this is not acceptable. One newspaper article (in Finnish) stating this story is here: http://www.itviikko.fi/ihmiset-ja-ura/2011/01/26/kl-elop-ohi...

Hedge fund ownership for the level of influence you're talking about is public information. One can easily compile and compare lists of top hedge fund holders in Microsoft and Nokia.

E.g. the current list of big Nokia holders is here. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nok/institutional-holdings

Microsoft: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/institutional-holdings

Historical data should also be easy to find if someone really wants to look.

The article is in Finnish and seems to be pretty short and not even attempt some basic research for what would be a big story. Even if that were true, what has this got to do with Microsoft executives? The deal certainly didn't raise Microsoft's share price. In fact, Microsoft's share price dropped when the takeover deal was announced, so these alleged hedge funds went from a Nokia share price of $11 before they got Elop hired and ended up with $7 with a low of $1.60(!!!) after influencing the decision to go Windows Phone? Does not make much sense to me.

Again, acting in other's companies' shareholders' interests is illegal for board members, and IIRC punishable by fines and prison time.

Maybe someone from Finland can tell us if the media outlet you referenced is more like the New York Times or a tabloid trying to cash in on a controversy while peddling conspiracy theories.

Re: Jolla

#174

Post by buster »

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.

https://sailfishos.org/about-license.html

Our goal with the Sailfish OS is to develop an open source operating system in co-operation with the community, thus ensuring the development of a best-of-breed operating system.

So it looks like the software will be open source. I just hope that the device will not be locked down..

Re: Jolla

#175

Post by shmerl »

davidw wrote: post #172
shmerl wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jolla looks to me better than Openmoko when it comes to adoption chances. And they are doing things right, basing their work on the common middleware (Mer + Nemo). PlasmaActive also uses Mer. They aren't suicide mission, they are a startup with planned strategy and aim to be profitable. Let's see how they fare.

I wish them the best of luck; I was just explaining why as a developer, I'm a bit leery of a new platform like this. I feel for them, as I know it's a very tough spot to be in.

It's tough on one hand, and it's a wild frontier waiting for more pioneers on the other hand, since there is lack of innovation (Android and iOS are pretty much stalled when it comes to introducing new ideas). So newcomers have good chances of providing interesting alternatives. I'd worry more about the sickening patents situation, than about lack of interest in new platforms.

But surely they'll need to attract developers more, since many aren't familiar with Sailfish. There was a recent post about from Mer folks:

http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-sailfishos-co-crea...

Re: Jolla

#176

Post by znowi »

One of their implicit pitch is that Jolla is "surveillance free". And it can run Android apps. I think these two features are good enough to spark an interest. The spec looks also impressive. But freedom doesn't come cheap at almost $550. Nonetheless, a very exciting development.

I'm also waiting for Firefox OS to mature and produce more devices.

I can't wait to drop Android. Each release takes more freedom away from the user and gets increasingly integrated with whatever social, cloud, data milking services they have at their disposal.

Funny how freedom becomes a competitive advantage for startups against the big and evil Internet giants.

Re: Jolla

#177

Post by Maakuth »

shooper wrote: post #111
davidw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 marke…

On the other hand, one can create Sailfish-native Qt apps that run on Android and iPhone as well. I'm not sure if Qt iOS support is completely ready, but it is something to look forward.

Re: Jolla

#178

Post by dandrews »

lambda wrote: post #114
MehdiEG wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 MeeG…

The Maemo-MeeGo transition didn't simply replace technical innards; it completely disrupted the Maemo user community, which relationship was negligently bungled by Nokia management. (Although it may also have been due to Intel's influence via the Moblin contingent.) Weep for maemo.org, which once upon a time was the best friend Nokia ever had.

Re: Jolla

#179

Post by shmerl »

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…

For more references, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810555

Re: Jolla

#180

Post by sampo »

shooper wrote: post #173
sampo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been rumours that the Nokia board chairman Ollila would have chosen someone from inside Nokia, but that largest owners of Nokia (some big American funds, who probably own a lot of Microsoft, too) told that this is not acceptable. One newspaper article (in Finnish) stating this story is here: http://www.itviikko.fi/ihmiset-ja-ura/2011/01/26/kl-elop-ohi...

Hedge fund ownership for the level of influence you're talking about is public information. One can easily compile and compare lists of top hedge fund holders in Microsoft and Nokia. E.g. the current list of big Nokia holders is here. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nok/institutional-holdings Microsoft: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/institutional-holdings Historical data should also be easy to find if someone really…

Here is another article (in Finnish), telling the same story, by Kauppalehti, the largest business-oriented newspaper in Finland.

http://www.kauppalehti.fi/etusivu/elop+ajoi+vanjoen+ohi+kalk...

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