New operating system – JOLLA from Nokia

New operating system – JOLLA from Nokia

Helsinki-based Jolla unveiled its first smartphone on Monday, which will be the first handset to run the company’s Sailfish OS. The two-year-old smartphone developer will name its inaugural phone “Jolla,” and the phone will reportedly sell for € 399, or roughly $513, when it sees its release date “by the end of 2013.” The Jolla phone is now available to preorder.
Jolla co-founder and head of software development Marc Dillon announced the first Sailfish OS-powered Jolla phone, which the company calls “The Other Half,” in a blog post on Monday.

Finland based mobile startup, Jolla, has unveiled its first smartphone that runs on the Sailfish OS which has been developed in-house by the company.

It’s not clear if the company has announced a name for the phone but it’s using the term “The Other Half,” derived from the phone’s removable back that comes in different colours, and changing the cover also changes the phone’s look and feel inline with its colour. The phone is priced at 399 Euros.

The phone features a 4.5-inch display and will be powered by a dual-core processor. It will sport an 8-megapixel camera with auto-focus and will offer 16GB of internal storage expandable via microSD card. The phone is “Android app compliant” which indicates that it will be capable of running Android apps though it’s not clear at this stage if it will directly support them or require developers to port them similar to how they work with BlackBerry 10. The phone will also feature 4G LTE connectivity.

As we mentioned, the phone runs the gesture-based Sailfish OS which is based on MeeGo which received acclaim when it launched on Nokia’s N9 smartphone. However, Nokia abandoned MeeGo and chose Windows Phone as the future OS platform for its smartphones,  following which a group of employees of Nokia’s MeeGo unit left the company to start Jolla and work on their own smartphone.

Jolla targets to ship the smartphone by end of 2013 and has introduced a Kickstarter-like ‘Movement’ in which people can participate by pre-ordering the phone. This will also be used by the company to gauge the response to its offering so that it can decide if there is demand for it. One can opt for a zero-cost pre-order option to reserve the phone when it launches, or pay 40 Euros for a limited edition phone and a t-shirt along with assured priority status. One can also pay 100 Euros and get all the goodies along with an extra back cover and 100 Euros off on the total price.

The number of countries where the phone will be shipped will be disclosed later and the 399 Euros price only includes VAT in Europe, so shipping costs, local taxes and duties will be extra.

“Jolla was born out of passion and expertise in creating mobile products,” Dillon said. “We saw that we had a chance to make something really unique, and we decided to do it although it seemed crazy to many people at the time. We have proven that by being different, doing unlike things and spreading the love, we can create a world class product with enormous demand and support from the world.”
The Jolla smartphone will run on the Sailfish open source OS — a build on the Mer OS kernel core, which is a fork of Nokia’s Linux-based MeeGo OS that also includes the Qt cross-platform framework and HTML5. It will also be Android-app compliant out of the box. In other words, the Jolla phone will be compatible with “multiple streams” — not surprising since it’s a Linux-based OS — that can support smartphones running both ARM and x86 chips.

But what’s most intriguing about the Jolla phone is that it’s customizable from both a software and hardware level. Since the phone is actually split into two halves, with its colorful back containing the hardware and communication components and its front half simply containing the display and processor, Dillon said users will have opportunities to augment their smartphones in many ways to make them feel truly personal.
Out of the box, the Jolla phone will feature a 4.5-inch “high definition” display (of unknown resolution), an 8-megapixel camera and a dual-core processor. The smartphone will carry 16GB on board with a microSD expansion slot for more storage, a user replaceable battery and a 4G LTE modem. The smartphone can also reportedly recognize the color of your case — available in many shades including orange and green — and adapt the visual theme of the Sailfish OS to create “your other half, exactly as you want it to be.”

The Jolla smartphone is certainly a worthy phone to house the successor of the MeeGo OS, but to get an idea of how the Jolla phone looks and feels with the new Sailfish OS, we encourage you to take a look at these photos and watch the videos to learn more about the Jolla smartphone with Sailfish.

What do you think about the first Jolla smartphone? Does the Sailfish OS seem attractive to you? Would you be willing to try or even purchase this smartphone upon its release date later this year?
Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.