Jolla, the company behind Sailfish and the, uh, Jolla, today unveiled a teaser of an upcoming device – at least, that’s what it looks like. The tagline is ‘Something BIG is about to begin’, indicating we’re either looking at a tablet or a much larger phone. The countdown counts down to 19 November, so we don’t have to wait long to find out what it’s all about.
Meanwhile, my own Jolla collects dust in a drawer as it’s simply not a very useful device without any proper 3rd party development activity going on. A few days ago, development on one of the few, proper Sailfish applications was halted, which really isn’t helping.
I’m always interested in new hardware, but sadly, it will solve none of the deeper, harder problems that Sailfish faces.
If only they’d make something for the people who’re not being served by the current market. I for example want a slider with a hardware keyboard again. We used to be able to get that with Android, but sadly the whole market’s gone to the oversized bricks with nothing but a screen on them lately. Jolla doesn’t stand a chance in that niche, but they could find one that’s not being met and try to at least grab that first. They’re making the same mistake Microsoft made with the first version of wp, but unlike them, Jolla doesn’t have a huge amount of cashflow to absorb that kind of mistake. They need to find relevance or they will fail.
Someone is developing a keyboard slider (kinda) for “The Other Half” interface on the Jolla phones –> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2028347278/tohkbd-the-other-hal…
Edited 2014-11-14 22:04 UTC
Why would there be any proper 3rd party development happening on Sailfish? Barely anyone has a phone that runs it… I have mentioned this before but us in North America are totally locked out. They need to create Sailfish ROMs for phones like the Nexus 5 which I own and would install in a heartbeat. This is their only hope to try to gain market share…
This is completely correct. Open devices like the Nexuses (sic?) are an ideal way for small companies to escape the “chicken and egg” problem and gain some developer momentum. I don’t own a Nexus device (yet), but I would buy one to experiment with different OSes.
Is there any indication of whether they are working on this?
Yeah they kinda did that….
http://www.jollausers.com/2014/09/how-to-install-sailfish-os-on-nex…
Things like the camera don’t work, but according to jolla it mostly works.
So apparently, Jolla missed the memo sen from Desktop Linux that “mostly” isn’t good enough when it comes to hardware actually working properly.
Yeah, I’m giving them a bit of a break as they’re really underfunded.
But they certainly have the old Nokia habit of making something that almost does what I want, but is almost impossible to buy.
No not really…
I am not talking about a community hack (first install another OS then install Sailfish, come on!) but official ROMs distributed by Jolla/Sailfish.
Edited 2014-11-14 21:41 UTC
Sad but true
The problem with nobody developing apps for Jolla is that there is no way you can make money with it. Sure, developing just for fun is nice, but to build a good app takes a bit more than just a couple hours in your spare time.
When they released the phone and opened the app store last year, they said, paid apps would come in the future. I talked to them about this topic earlier this year at the MWC, but they couldn’t give me any indication on when that would happen.
They’ll have to give developers the chance to either put a price tag on their apps or to include ads in their applications to make some money. That – and some numbers on how many devices were actually sold – would attract more devs. Otherwise it’ll stay as is with some few nice apps (e.g. Meecast, Tweetian and a couple more) in the store, but not more.
There were a few good, free apps for the Nokia N9. For instance, it had two usable FOSS Spotify clients at a time when you couldn’t find that for desktop Linux. With Meego, I always thought it would be the open source community that would be the driving force. Unfortunately, no one has any faith in the platform anymore.
All successful open source projects have some form of commercial funding behind them, either directly or indirectly.
There is little hope for projects living from high school and university students building up curriculum.
Untrue, except for the bigger projects. Most mobile apps are trivial.
Maybe, if you’re talking about fart, torch and vibrator apps.
Torch apps are highly useful (finally included in Lollipop), and I remember reading complaints just a couple of weeks ago about how insanely difficult it is to find one that isn’t encumbered with advertising and demands privacy-invading permissions. There are thousands of them, and most are crap. (Motorola’s DroidLight is perfectly good.)
And no, most mobile apps are front-ends to web services. Glorified RSS readers. Trivial, and as the web gets more mobile friendly, also less and less useful. They exist because the mobile web is still crap.
There are tons of Linux applications, many of then even use Qt. With this they would cover most areas with the exception of games and niche applications.
Well bleep, this seems like a rerun of the Maemo mess…
Seems the new device breaks with the “other half” of the old, just as the old is finally seeing some third party action (albeit via kickstarter) using the capabilities of the other half concept.
Ok, everything you say is true, but look, I have a Jolla and it’s really a great phone for everyday usage. It’s almost kind of boring, the stability, the consistency. All of my daily tasks are covered with native apps. And most of them are quite good. Give me a f.lux/redshift like app and I’m in heaven.
When I need the odd Android application I can simply grab it from a store, run it and see that I’m not missing out on anything important. ;-D
Well, then again, I come from webOS and we are used to not beeing treated as first class citizens.
Yes, I have this phone and I’m extremely happy with it, for all the reasons you mention, plus a very good battery life.
More native applications would certainly be very welcome, but I don’t think Jolla cannot succeed with the current low level of developer mindshare. They are small and don’t need to sell millions of phones.
Edited 2014-11-16 21:37 UTC
It seems that the only realistic stepping stone to native Jolla apps
is ‘native QT apps’, that leverage that framework to work on all platforms QT works on,
obviously Jolla itself, but including iOS, Android, Windows, etc, with proper compilation.
That itself is solving a problem of app development on just the major Os’,
and the fact that Jolla would be just as much a ‘1st class’ citizen is gravy,
that can be leveraged to THEN really promote Jolla-specific feature leveraging in apps.
Clearly at some point non-free apps need to work and work WELL,
but I honestly don’t see that as the majority of the problem right now,
albeit it is an EASIER problem to fix.
Jolla is great to have. Even Sailfish OS is nice, but their customer service is so bad, I would never ever recommend to get a Jolla device unless you are in Finland.
Since my Jolla arrived, my beautiful 808 has just been a camera.
The Jolla has a lot more functionality than I need from my phone with the apps/Android apps currently loaded.
In March I was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given two months to live { myvi-magic.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/little-things-bring-big-changes.html }, the tumour stops me using my right/dominant arm, but I can use the Jolla single handedly, with the wrong hand, Unfortunately, no other phone I have tried lets me do this. I can not use the camera though.
I do not see what the fuss about native apps is. Should not apps be written in HTML5? This would make them browser dependent and not platform dependent. Hence, Apple Mac would not be able to dictate what goes onto your machine, that you have already been over charged for, and the strangle hold of iOS/Android would be reduced allowing greater access to the market for all platforms.
Further, there is no Android tax extorted by Microsoft, so I can buy a Jolla, unlike most Androids/ChromeBooks.
All things considered, I can not see a better phone available, although that might change on Wednesday!