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The Jolla phone – first impressions

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Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#81

Post by wisty »

daliusd wrote: post #67
nl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's probably a fair point. It wasn't clear until I looked at the architecture diagram, though. Native Sailfish apps are Qt based; with android apps as a secondary thing, presumably to kick-start the platform while they try to build an ecosystem. (Which makes sense, developers won't come unless people are using it but people won't use it if there are no apps.) I'm guessing that was Blackberry's strategy too.…

I have different question. Technically no vendor can offer something exceptionally different from hardware point of view. Bazillion megapixels, bazillion megaherz, bazillion cores and etc. - nobody cares about that. It takes decent pictures - good enough. It is not camera with lens replacement anyway. It works reasonably fast - good enough, I take it. Replaceable parts(1) - meh I don't care unless I can attach lens b…

Just checking ... you know why Microsoft has won so many wars? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

You could almost always upgrade to Microsoft without losing your old data and programs. CP/M programs could be ran virtually unmodified on DOS. Lotus documents could be opened in Office. But if anything used special Microsoft-only features them the customer would need to keep using Microsoft products.

Assuming customers will only upgrade to a new system that can run their old programs, and open their old documents, then eventually they'd all end up stuck with Microsoft.

Obviously, not every customer is like that, and iOS customers won't have a reason to switch, but it's not a terrible strategy.

Offering Android means that users can upgrade from an Android phone. Offering Qt means that users will get trapped (at least, until there's enough users that Android makers start trying to fight back, but that's a good problem to have).

Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#82

Post by [deleted] »

archagon wrote: post #54
marquis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think long-term. What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser? Media recording and management? HTML5 is well on the way and someone compiled a functional version of FFMpeg in Javascript just recently. Storage? Security? Dropbox and more of the kind. We already have document management. The only thing I can think of right now is a render farm but we'll do that in the cloud anyway (even…

It's impossible to predict things long-term. I mean, maybe we'll eventually get web applications that look and feel exactly like native apps. But maybe we'll still be stuck with kludgy, hacky, JS/HTML5-based apps that have rendering problems depending on your browser, that load in ugly chunks, that save your data to some proprietary cloud, that fail at concurrency, that don't integrate with your OS's multitasking wor…

[deleted]

Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#83

Post by leoedin »

valvoja wrote: post #72

Meh. I'd wait for the first few objective reviews. I lost interest when they said things like "there is one hardware feature that is unique to Jolla: The Other Half [...] a concept of user-changeable smart back cover." Surely replaceable plastic covers have been around for decades and they are mostly associated with low-end feature phones... or really old Nokias.

So you lost interest... and stopped reading completely? Had you read any further you would have realised that the unique feature is that there's both a power connector and an I2C interface available to those back covers. It's a pretty brilliant concept - you could interface with the whole host of cool chips which use I2C, or even build yourself a little robot chassis.

Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#84

Post by daliusd »

wisty wrote: post #81
daliusd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have different question. Technically no vendor can offer something exceptionally different from hardware point of view. Bazillion megapixels, bazillion megaherz, bazillion cores and etc. - nobody cares about that. It takes decent pictures - good enough. It is not camera with lens replacement anyway. It works reasonably fast - good enough, I take it. Replaceable parts(1) - meh I don't care unless I can attach lens b…

Just checking ... you know why Microsoft has won so many wars? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. You could almost always upgrade to Microsoft without losing your old data and programs. CP/M programs could be ran virtually unmodified on DOS. Lotus documents could be opened in Office. But if anything used special Microsoft-only features them the customer would need to keep using Microsoft products. Assuming customers will o…

Just checking if I got it right: Google with Android is successfully using Microsoft strategy.

In that case Firefox OS is in the best position to compete against Android. FxOS phones can be very cheap as well. But is that enough to make it next big thing in smartphone's market?

Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#85

Post by daliusd »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #31
djjose wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about this POV from folks of getting mobile web apps to look and feel like mobile native apps being a prerequisite for success. I just don't think this is true. After all, desktop web apps look and feel nothing like desktop native apps. I too believe that mobile web will one day overtake mobile native apps for most peoples' daily usage. I just don't think it'll look or act anything like what we're current…

Yes, I agree, I don't think normal people really care about a. native look and feel and b. 60fps animations. People want apps that are easy to learn and use, have the features they need, and free.

People are willing to pay for good product. You can remove "free" from your list.

Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#86

Post by alextingle »

daliusd wrote: post #78
alextingle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally disagree with you on hardware: > Technically no vendor can offer something exceptionally different from hardware point of view. Just because vendors are falling over themselves to makes Iphone clones, doesn't mean there's no other way. Personally, the whole current smartphone scene leaves me cold, because no-one is making hardware for me. I want a small, robust phone I can put in my pocket and forget about. S…

Nokia 515 is waiting for you. Really. Check out it. Still there is nothing exceptional about this hardware IMHO.

Yeah, I'm waiting for prices to come down on that one. (Although it's still a bit large for me.)

Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#87

Post by alextingle »

RyanZAG wrote: post #77
alextingle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally disagree with you on hardware: > Technically no vendor can offer something exceptionally different from hardware point of view. Just because vendors are falling over themselves to makes Iphone clones, doesn't mean there's no other way. Personally, the whole current smartphone scene leaves me cold, because no-one is making hardware for me. I want a small, robust phone I can put in my pocket and forget about. S…

Huh? There are thousands and thousands of devices just like that. They don't make the news though because they're boring and cheap. Head past your nearest phone shop and you can find a huge variety of those kind of phones at incredibly low prices ($20 prepaid kind of prices).

It would be nice to see a small form factor phone capable of running Android - it should be possible, now they can make hi-res displays.

Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#88

Post by purringmeow »

ye wrote: post #52
marquis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think long-term. What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser? Media recording and management? HTML5 is well on the way and someone compiled a functional version of FFMpeg in Javascript just recently. Storage? Security? Dropbox and more of the kind. We already have document management. The only thing I can think of right now is a render farm but we'll do that in the cloud anyway (even…

> What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser? Off the top of my head, 1) Anything low level hardware (reading data via USB, or pushing data into HDMI, for instance) 2) Interacting with ANY hardware that's not explicitly supported by Javascript. Try creating an HTML5/JS scanner app. 3) Writing super-fast CPU-specific code, think Assembly language. That's the reason there are no HTML5…

If anything can't be written in JS now, it will be written in JS in the future. Everything will be in JS some day.

Re: The Jolla phone – first impressions

#89

Post by apetrovic »

RussianCow wrote: post #59
camus2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps. People have been saying that for 5 years + , the "future" still has a long way to go. By the way , that's what the iphone was supposed to be, a phone where devs write browser apps... we all know what happened.

Not really, though. That was clearly just a marketing gimmick by Apple. They really haven't pushed HTML5 as much as they made it seem.

From http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/s...

"When it [iPhone] first came out in early 2007, there were no apps you could buy from outside developers, and Jobs initially resisted allowing them," writes Isaacson. "He didn't want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity."

Then reality happened.

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