Live data from Hacker News

Jolla Phone Pre-Order

commerce.jolla.com

141–150 of 275 posts

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#141

> Pre-Order Now for 99 € Is this something generally understood to be a down payment in EU nomenclature? Just curiosity, as in the US I'd generally expect it to mean you get a phone on launch for the stated price, and a down payment to use something along the lines of "reserve for...".

I live in Poland and I'd expect the same as you.

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#142
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every now and then some phone manufacturer mistakes online sentiment for actual demand and gets burned making a mini phone that won’t sell

Small phones are also way less addictive. It's not in the interest of the mobile ecosystem.

How do you assess that? I'd imagine it would be more along the lines of is the phone frictionless to use?

This is just an anecdote but I owned every Google Nexus phone they made up to Nexus 5. A series of bugs caused priceless videos to get ruined and I decided to try iPhone after that. I didn't realize just how much I unconsciously hated using the Nexus phone and that contributed to me not actually adopting smartphone software until I got the iPhone. When the phone and the OS were a burden it led to the phone being avoided. I dont know which was better. I appreciate the battery life, camera and general stability but I hate the new addictions to social media it has caused.

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#143

I went down a 1-minute rabbithole. I hate Whatsapp, but it's not optional. So I was curious if it's compatible. There's a Sailfish help page [0] showing how to get the APK from Aptoide, or downloading directly from Whatsapp.com . But with Google killing off 'sideloading', is it credible that independent APK sources are going to dry up in future? [0] https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Help_Articles/Whatsapp_S...

”I hate Whatsapp, but it's not optional” Yes it is.

While WhatsApp is not very much used in the US, in some other countries such as Brazil it is basically the primary form of "phone" communication. It is everyone's default text, voice and video message platform. People don't ask if you have WhatsApp there, they just assume it. You talk to your Bank/Investor manager using WhatsApp. You order pizza through WhatsApp. Customer Support for services is WhatsApp bots that send you to the correct places. If I don't have WhatsApp, I can't voice chat with my mom, she won't see her grandkids. If you have any sort of business, you need WhatsApp.

And yes, I do have Signal installed, and there are only 2 people who talk to me through it (one being my partner).

Phone carriers got too greedy charging for every single SMS message and phone call, WhatsApp took over when smartphones became popular.

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#144
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a company of their size that has to compete in the tech market of today, I'm surprised they're able to produce updates for the OS as regular as they do. Blaming they can't keep up with user requests, granted reasonable ones, is a little short sighted in my opinion. If we want to break the Apple/Google duopoly we need to be able to bear a couple of paper cuts. If you wait for perfection before committing they'll j…

This is nonsense. They cant force vendors to support them, so the only viable strategy is to support the vendors. And they can, but they decided not to.

I feel like you're focusing on the wrong thing from what I said. Jolla is a small company, they don't have the man power to support everything. They already do a lot by supporting devices from vendors that are sympathetic to being open (the Sony open devices program for example).

> And they can, but they decided not to.

They can what, exactly?

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#145
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 5-ish inch screen phone has even been released within the past 5 years? The only ones I can think of are the Unihertz phones, and those don't get a single update after getting shoved out the door, not to mention that they're probably full of Chinese backdoors. I'd buy that exact phone in a heartbeat if it didn't have those problems, and all the other ones I've seen have similar dealbreakers.

iPhone had the 12 and 13 mini, but they didn't sell, so there was no iPhone 14 mini and hasn't been one since. That was a 5.4" display.

I skipped that one because my SE 2 was less than a year old and I didn't want to go up a size.

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#146
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're right. SailfishOS inherits the core of the OS from the old Maemo of Nokia N900 fame (though the UI was built from scratch I believe). I tried it back in the day on my Nexus 4 and it was buttery smooth, even with all its fancy animations and gesture-based navigation, which was way ahead of Android at the time. I always thought SailfishOS would really take off by now, given how advanced and polished it alrea…

The platform always suffered from two big architectural missteps. 1 - the native browser being an old firefox/gecko fork embedded into their own UI framework, giving a poor performance and dated compatibility quirks 2 - the android emulating runtime meant that you get again, dated , poorly performing android apps, that you're driven towards because the browser engine was so poor. these two mean you basically end up w…

Same experience here, though from Sailfish OS run on their first Jolla phone.

Also permission model on Sailfish was much worse than on Android. I didn't use Android apps on Sailfish, though.

I really liked Silica UI, but available apps had much less functionality than their counterparts on Android and iOS. I think that open sourcing Sailfish and Silica would end up better for them.

Nevertheless, I kinda liked the phone, but ultimately went back to Android.

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 5-ish inch screen phone has even been released within the past 5 years? The only ones I can think of are the Unihertz phones, and those don't get a single update after getting shoved out the door, not to mention that they're probably full of Chinese backdoors. I'd buy that exact phone in a heartbeat if it didn't have those problems, and all the other ones I've seen have similar dealbreakers.

iPhone SE 3 was released in 2022

Very fair. I skipped it because my SE 2 was still going strong when that came out, which I kind of regret now, since I can't get a new SE 3 anymore.

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#148
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply chain has left us. Since there's no new development happening with small phones, we'd have to settle for "older spec" screens (IE, new stock iPhone 5 screens, with none of the colour accuracy, frame-rate etc improvements from the last 10 years). People don't like "old spec", so they'd probably not buy those devices. If you're a small player, then you're downstream of the supply chain, you don't make the rules.…

> colour accuracy, frame-rate Absolutely irrelevant for what I do with a phone, and I'd wager that 90% of users would not notice the difference.

90% wouldn't notice, but of those 90%, 5% compared specs and got the phone with better color accuracy "just in case," and 95% just went to their local retailer and either bought the newest phone or the cheapest phone.

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#149
post #81

"Real Linux on a phone" sounds to me like the worst user experience imaginable. And the whole thing about "no phoning home" should be interpreted as "we have no idea whether the latest release is crashing in the wild or not".

You probably never used Maemo, whose UI (and also Palm's WebOS UI) were ripped off for later versions of Android and iOS, which wasn't even multitasking yet. Literally hired the same people to do them. Jolla started with the FOSS parts of Maemo but went proprietary. If Nokia hadn't been intentionally destroyed by its board in a romance with Microsoft cash, through a Canadian snake, Maemo would have been a real conten…

Hear, hear.

I once asked David Potter what happened post-symbian, and he smiled and shrugged

Re: Jolla Phone Pre-Order

#150
post #59
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people aren't willing to sacrifice half their screen real estate 100% of the time, or deal with a significantly thicker phone, just to get a physical keyboard. The market for that is very small.

The market is small, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a significant overlap between those who want a keyboard and the target audience of the Jolla phone. Don't forget that SailfishOS is ultimately Linux (and not like Android) - it even comes with the zypper package manager that lets you install apps and update the OS using the terminal. Part of the fun of using SailfishOS is doing familiar Linux systems manag…

They're probably not interested in the Linux power user. They're interested in making their phone viable for everyone else, since that's a much bigger market, and for that customer base, a keyboard is very much going to be a negative and not a positive. The Linux part of their Linux phone also has the same problem, but they apparently have faith in that part.
Post reply on HN