Jolla cuts hardware biz loose to concentrate on Sailfish licensing Hardware and software outfit Jolla is to give up making hardware, with that part of the business set to be taken on by a new, yet-to-be-announced company, with Jolla then concentrating on its Sailfish OS. Juhani Lassila, head of communications at Jolla, said: “We are definitely confident in the [yet-to-exist] hardware company …
Surely, 'a phone from someone that isn't Jolla running Sailfish' is not necessarily the same as 'a new phone' - we've seen cases with Ubuntu and Firefox where a manufacturer just ported them onto a phone that more normally runs Android. If for instance Yota is switching from Android to Sailfish they could easily do that with their already shipping hardware.
Well yeah, of course all OS ports to new hardware have a certain amount of difficulty. What it won't be harder than, though, is doing the exact same thing with a brand new prototype phone where on top of the normal problems of the software port the hardware bugs haven't yet been ironed out either.
Which makes it a geeky product that normal people won't bother with.
People go into a shop and buy a phone, the word "firmware" never gets mentioned ever as part of the sales process. Not even if a geek is buying it.
So having a phone you can just go in and buy is an advantage.
In fact, many phones are locked down and warranties are up if you mess with them. I can really see normal people using the command line to unlock the bootloader.
It's all about the apps these days, the days of phones being different to computers is long gone. It doesn't matter how nice the OS is, if the apps are shite or don't exist then it's a serious disadvantage.
Agreed. I have a Jolla phone and attempted to get the wife to use it. She has tried but it just doesn't do what she wants it to. Having said that, neither do most the others she has used either! Lack of apps that worked well was her biggest complaint, no matter how I try to dissuade her she uses it for everything and it is very convenient.
I think it's a good move for them to regain their software focus, though it makes it harder to get their code into people's hands. I'd love to install SailfishOS on an "old" phone like the Sony Xperia Z and give it some post-Lollipop legs.
Now if I could install SailfishOS on Sony's Open Device handsets, try it out and if I don't like it reinstall Android. Sony's hardware tends to be solid (and pretty). That's what we do with PC/laptops/etc...why not phones? Android's HAL hides a lot of the hardware though we might still have to suffer binary blobs for camera or other "special" bits.
To even be considered a usable port, I'd expect all the radios and sensors to at least work which, for many of those platforms listed, is not the case. That's where I think a helping hand to SailfishOS from the OEM is required, even if that might involve some binary blobs.
It's full functionality or go home.
Unfortunately under N's previous stewardship, they kept changing direction and technologies every year or so.
- GTK to QT
- Debian (apt) to Fedora (rpm)
Back in 2005 Maemo was something promising, but constant changes ruined that.
I still remember my N810 and N900 fondly, so I'm hoping that just possibly a Jolla table will arrive next month.
Sadly I feel the smartphone wars are over... and it's a Android/iOS world with maybe a SMALL place for Windows...
Jolla has no ecosystem, and its the ecosystem that ties and keeps people to their chosen platforms. Would an iOS user with say just $200 of paid apps/content ever consider switching? They just get the next iPhone and magically everything transfers over, the same with Android, and with Android you have more phone choices, but your Google ecosystem transfers over. These platforms are so entrenched now that a majority of people will not bother switching, especially if they have to lose something. Features, Apps, Content...
What can you differentiate on? That your not Apple/Google/Microsoft? That may matter some small set of people, but a majority simply do not care.
Price? Doesn't stop Apple. There are plenty of cheap Android phones, and plenty of cheap and capable Windows Phones and you don't see them making much of a difference.
Again what does Jolla offer, especially to the end user, and especially if they cannot snapchat because that app is not available on the platform.
Sorry folks but for the foreseeable future, Google and Apple have won...
People don't care, they buy phones like their cars, tvs and fridges - in general they buy their mates and family have and what is perceived to be the best (iphone), failing that they will buy a samsung (that is, in the world of carphone warehouse normal phone customers, the 'alternative' choice) and if they are feeling really different they may get a Sony, HTC or maybe even a nokia/ms windows phone. Not even BlackBerry gets a look in (I have a passport and people laugh at it...quite why I don't know, it suits my needs best and for my own reasons I dislike ios and android).
I actually had a jolla for a while...I liked it but really, no one is going to buy it at this stage...too much of an unknown quantity and no one likes to buy what their mates don't have (apart from me it seems)
It's pretty disappointing that we are left with only a dilemma choice, both iOS and Android are unsatisfactory for me in their own ways, I end up choosing the least irritating (to me) option.
I would really thank some new players to come in and offer a true alternative to Apple.
Pretty much every OSX & iDevice is a NeXT device.... With 800 million iDevices alone, it's hardly a failure. Even when it was just NeXT, it was still a relative success as it was fairly widely used in high-end computing.
Sure, their original model didn't work long term, but that doesn't equal failure. BeOS would have been a much, much better example.
I wouldn't necessarily consider it failed per se, it was acquired by a larger company, and effectively took over that same larger company, which isn't a fail normally. :) NeXT is the very foundation of the current OSX Mac's and the underpinnings of their iThings as well.
...as a Jolla user (I tried to shift to the Ubuntu phone but that was a dire mess so had to go back to it) I really think that Sailfish will only hav ea future if someone with the financial and technical resources of a company beginning with N, takes it on.
It is a real shame to see it go this way; but I have to admit that I wasn't happy with the direction that this particular ship was sailing in.
Doesn't mean that I'm going back to Android or iOS, though. I still wish Sailfish well; they're doing better than Ubuntu in my book.
> He was not prepared to say outright that the company will announce any licensees at the event.
True. Instead they'll make the announcement just before the official start of the event in an attempt to grab some early headlines.[1]
As an Indigogo funder, I wish they had done this a year ago and perhaps by now I'd be using Sailfish on a re-purposed Hudl. As it is I'm going to receive a museum piece, eventually.[2]
[1] Every other PR agency is planning something similar, each believing that they have the "most important" announcement that will get the headlines when the reality will be that they're all upstaged by a cat video. :-)
[2] TBH, I was half-expecting it to never materialise anyway, so anything is a bonus. ;-)
I've seen a Jolla in my local CeX for a tidy £135. Tempting plan as I have a second back with mine - stopped using mine a while ago because I was sick of the WiFi issues. Two different basestations, WPA or WPA2 - it just craps out and I either have to turn the WiFi off and on again, or the phone itself to restore operation.
Was going to keep hold of it because it was a good phone (aside from the WiFi issue), and the Barclays Android app won't install unless you remove 'su' from /sbin because it thinks it's trying to install on a rooted phone and spits its dummy out - and now they're stopping doing hardware it may just be time to part ways with it.
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