For the people who are genuinely confused, Jolla is a company that sells smartphones, their first smartphone is also called Jolla; it runs Sailfish OS, which is effectively a fork of the Meego operating system which Nokia used in its N9/N900 phones, before they switched to Windows Mobile. This is not very surprising, because Jolla is a Finnish company principally made up of ex-Nokia engineers, including a lot of the people who created the N9 in the first place. Sailfish OS stays closer to Linux than Android, using Wayland, Qt/QML, PulseAudio etc, and adhering to the Linux Standard Base specification. It also comes packaged with an Android runtime based on Alien Dalvik, so that it can run Android applications (similar to Blackberry 10), although it won't have access to Google Play or the Play Services APIs. The phone is being launched this week in Finland, and there are plans for release in the rest of Europe, and in China, though not so far in the US.

Edit: Some more technical details about the OS: https://sailfishos.org/about-technology.html

Please forward this paragraph to their web folks. Just put it right at the top as a first-read. Then everything else makes a lot more sense.

The first paragraph on a sales page should never include the word "pulseaudio." It probably shouldn't even include "Linux" unless you're selling server hardware.

For that matter, it shouldn't include fork (unless you are talking about the eating utensil), Meego (WTH is that?), Dalvik, etc.

To us geeks, yes, but that's still not giving anybody else a single reason to buy the thing.

I'm pretty sure they can't use "Nokia" in their advertisements.

Yes, but there's one interesting bit of fine print in the Nokia-Microsoft deal that gives the runt company (that was the old Nokia) the right to start using the Nokia name again... as of January 1, 2016:

http://followingjolla.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-small-print-t...

Of course Jolla is a different company as well... but we're barely 2 years away from more wild naming-strategery options, for Nokia-offshoot Finnish companies.

I'm pretty sure they can say jolla is the phone, sailfish the os, and that it comes from meego tho. and everything else without mentioning even Nokia. heh.

I just did experiment and asked my wife what OS is running on her phone. She has no idea. She owns N9.

I'm a software developer with 20 years of professional experience, 18 of them on Linux, and 33 years of time spend immersed in technology every day, and I didn't know the N9 ran Meego until I read the paragraph above. I was somewhat aware of Jolla and Sailfish, and vaguely aware it had Linux somewhere there, but only barely.

They probably should not mention the OS very much, and focus on getting people to recognize the brand and reasons why they should want the phones, and only mention "Linux" and "Meego" far down the list.

Stock N9 doesn't even run Meego (proper). It runs Harmattan, a transitional system which is more Maemo than Meego underneath. Nokia planned to evolve it into Meego proper, but never did since it soon sunk into the oblivion of WP. Some parts of Meego (not Harmattan) were forked by the community as Mer, and some other parts (namely Meego Handset) as Nemo. Sailfish is built on Mer and parts of Nemo, adding its own UI on top. All this (including historic evolution of Moblin and Maemo to Meego) can be pretty confusing for those who didn't follow these developments. See also this chart: https://github.com/kumadasu/tizen-history

I think the idea of the site was to get the name jolla out there and to get consumers asking: what is a jolla?

I believe from the questions above they've succeeded. If they just said, hey there's another phone called jolla I doubt I'd have taken a look.

Could they parody action movie trailers and say something like "From the engineers who brought you the legendary Nokia N900..."?

How does that help the 'normal people are confused' argument?

Thanks for this, I too am curious as to why this isn't in the sale copy on the page. I actually thought it was a dev framework of some kind.

You mentioned it won't have access to Google Play or Play Services APIs. That will be a serious challenge, and they are bound to end up with a lot of frustrated customers.

I don't see how they can advertise that it runs "top Android apps" & "latest Android apps" without supporting the Play Services APIs.

Not having to join your phone to Google Skynet is a major plus for many people.

Also, many Android devices are in the same boat (pun intended!) as the vendors haven't licensed the proprietary bits from Google.

Yeah, it'll be interesting. This really is also the key question as to whether non-Google Android distributions are actually viable. Essentially whether controlled Play Services means you control Android. Although, bear in mind that they are running their own App Store, so they should be able to filter for reliance on those APIs, which would at least mean you wouldn't have software crashing (just people somewhat mystified as to why certain Apps aren't available).

Jolla uses Yandex.Store instead of Google Play. See http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jolla-yandex/

How refreshing it is with a tech product that doesn't launch in the US first! I'm quite happy that there are more non-US non-China competitors popping up in the mobile market.

I think that might partly explain the advertising, they seem to be modelling themselves on that Central/Northern European, Berlin counter-culture, Girl-with-a-Dragon-Tattoo, techy-savvy hacker kind of thing. Problem is, at least from the other side of Europe, that seems like it would represent a fairly tiny demographic, and I'm not sure deliberately avoiding the mainstream, and going for semi-obscurity, is all that great a marketing idea!

But, in any case, regardless of the marketing, the phone does seem promising. Seems to be the most credible of the open source challengers to Android/iOS, much more so than Ubuntu Touch, for instance, because of the direct experience of the staff and the fact that a phone is actually being sold. Also, personally speaking, it's nice to see an open source OS made by a company apparently looking to make money from selling hardware and software, as a product, rather than from leveraging user data.

> I think that might partly explain the advertising, they seem to be modelling themselves on that Central/Northern European, Berlin counter-culture, Girl-with-a-Dragon-Tattoo, techy-savvy hacker kind of thing.

woo, lots of stereotypes here..i found the video to be really likeable.

> Also, personally speaking, it's nice to see an open source OS made by a company apparently looking to make money from selling hardware and software, as a product, rather than from leveraging user data.

That works as long as arent very successful and others start to use Sailfish

Being a tech-savvy european here, I just like everyone here, was totally confused by their landing page.

Thus, I highly doubt they targetted anyone there.

> I think that might partly explain the advertising, they seem to be modelling themselves on that Central/Northern European, Berlin counter-culture, Girl-with-a-Dragon-Tattoo, techy-savvy hacker kind of thing.

What the heck is that?

For more references, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810555

Thank you so much, I couldn't figure out what they were offering exactly. ;-)

Did they make the switch to Qt 5 before the release or will the first version ship with Qt 4?

They switched to Qt 5 when they had to switch from using ST-Ericsson to Qualcomm and found out that there is no way they can get X.org drivers from them. So they started using libhybris with Android drivers and Wayland on top, and that by default implied Qt 5.

Just found this page: https://sailfishos.org/about-technology.html

They use Qt 5.

The real question is when are they going to announce a total rewrite of the OS that will obsolete the shipping version. Usually they announce that right about the time the phone ships.

By that reasoning, Android 4.4 obsoleted 4.3.

I'm not going to explain the joke, but Android is backwards compatible.

the joke is that this is what Nokia did almost every time they released a NIT OS (ie maemo) version.

Didn't N900 run Maemo? Also, I'm not even sure N9 ran Meego. If it did, then it was Meego + Nokia's own UI.

As I understand, N900 ran Maemo, which was then merged into Meego, which ran on the N9, in combination with Nokia's proprietary UI, called Harmattan. Just tried to glaze over some of the gory details for the sake of brevity. Also, Jolla seem to have built their new UI along similar lines to Harmattan (button-less, reliance on slide-from-edges etc).

  or the Play Services APIs

Huh. So I can't use any of the Google apps, like gmail?

No, because Google will only license those libraries and frameworks to "pure" Android devices as certified by Google.

And Google will not certify sailfish OS as Android.

Wow.

Suddenly I'm interested.

For comparison, Nokia's N9 / Meego Harmattan (Jolla Sailfish's predecessor) site from 2011: http://swipe.nokia.com/design/

Nokia made a clearer case for the OS. Jolla's video shows a bunch of rapid-fire tasks that are too hard to follow, and doesn't really showcase the simplicity of the swipe system like Nokia did. There's not enough that's surfaced here to show why you'd choose Jolla over Apple or Google.

We all know how well N9 did in unseating Apple...

Might have done better if MS' trojan horse hadn't cancelled it on release...

I find this kind of comments very funny. If Microsoft had the ability to install their moles as CEOs, why don't they do the same thing to Samsung, Apple, Google, HTC, etc. etc.?

How exactly does one company go about installing their moles as CEOs of other companies? Bribe and blackmail the board members? You're ascribing Microsoft the powers of a comic book supervillain while they cannot even sell a few million Surface RT tablets.

For reference, this is the profile of the chairman of the board. Do you think a bribe from Microsoft is likely to influence this person's decisions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila

>Jorma Jaakko Ollila (born 15 August 1950) is a Finnish businessman, since 1 June 2006, Non-Executive Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell. He was Chairman (1999–2012) and CEO (1992–2006) of Nokia Corporation. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company (2000– ), UPM-Kymmene (1997– ), and Otava Books and Magazines Group Ltd. (1996–). >For Nokia, he was credited with turning the company into the then world's largest handset maker.[1]

>As CEO of Nokia he has led the strategy that restructured the former industrial conglomerate into one of the major companies in the mobile phone and telecommunications infrastructure markets.

So you're telling me that Microsoft somehow bribed that guy, who no doubt would've made tens of millions from turning Nokia into a $100+ bilion dollar company, made him risk everything including national shame and prison time if exposed and seeing the company he built destroyed and hand over the reins to a Microsoft mole?

Or perhaps the Nokia board evaluated their options and wanted Nokia to have the bags of cash from Microsoft which Google reportedly was not willing to supply and save Nokia jobs instead of turning it into another slowly dying RIM and wanted to go Windows Phone, and hired Elop to do the transition. Now, the merits of the decision itself is subject to analysis, doubt and discussion, but the accusations of Elop being a mole derail the discussion that can be had about the Symbian and Blackberry burning platforms.

My conclusion is that a number of people who so strongly seem believe in this idea on tech forums either a) Don't know how CEOs are hired or what a Board of Directors of a company does b) Listen to the conspirational ideas on Slashdot, Groklaw, /r/Android and /r/linux and take it as gospel without thinking it through because the story fits the "Evil M$ kills a Linux OS" victim mentality narrative they want to believe in and they want a 41MP Nokia Android phone real bad c) Jump on the popular anti-MS bandwagon without any rational thought, oh hey, free and easy karma points! d) Believe in the NASA moon hoax too.

That comment says more about the writer than what it says about Elop, how can otherwise smart people succumb to such group thinking?. I haven't found one remotely plausible explanation about how Microsoft installed Elop as the CEO of Nokia. Maybe someone can help me and explain it here, but I am not holding my breath.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

You're closer to the truth than the conspiracy theorists, but when Elop was hired, Meego was still actually on the table as The Nokia Future. He took it off the table because in his estimation it just wasn't ready. (I worked for Nokia at the time, saw the N9 prototype at the same point in its life he did when he made that call, and he was right. It just wasn't ready.)

And, as a fairly long article in Business Week (I think) detailed a couple years ago, Android was actually the first choice over Windows Phone, but Google and Nokia couldn't come to terms: Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.

Having said all that, I can understand some of the conspiracy mindset around this. Nokia wrote Elop's contract in a way which basically gave him a huge golden parachute if the handset division was sold to someone else, and that really is nuts -- I doubt the intention was to explicitly reward failure, but it's damn easy to paint it that way. But this whole "secret mole" thing? Frankly, whatever one thinks about Microsoft's business practices, I don't think it's plausible that they're really clever enough to pull this off.

> Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.

Can you elaborate? It's hard to understand in light of all the extra cruft the carriers put on their Android devices.

Nokia wanted to use its maps and not Google's, but still be a Google services licensee. That's a no go as far as Google is concerned. Microsoft let Nokia replace its Bing maps with Here, and in fact licensed it as a replacement for the Bing mapping data.

Third party apps on carrier devices that have the Google Play store are in addition to the Google services, not replacing them. The Google services are all there, even if they're hidden.

Would the thing have been feasible if they'd simply bundled Here and kept the Google Maps app on the menu as well? It seems like an odd thing to become a sticking point.

There have been rumours that the Nokia board chairman Ollila would have chosen someone from inside Nokia, but that largest owners of Nokia (some big American funds, who probably own a lot of Microsoft, too) told that this is not acceptable.

One newspaper article (in Finnish) stating this story is here: http://www.itviikko.fi/ihmiset-ja-ura/2011/01/26/kl-elop-ohi...

Hedge fund ownership for the level of influence you're talking about is public information. One can easily compile and compare lists of top hedge fund holders in Microsoft and Nokia.

E.g. the current list of big Nokia holders is here. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nok/institutional-holdings

Microsoft: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/institutional-holdings

Historical data should also be easy to find if someone really wants to look.

The article is in Finnish and seems to be pretty short and not even attempt some basic research for what would be a big story. Even if that were true, what has this got to do with Microsoft executives? The deal certainly didn't raise Microsoft's share price. In fact, Microsoft's share price dropped when the takeover deal was announced, so these alleged hedge funds went from a Nokia share price of $11 before they got Elop hired and ended up with $7 with a low of $1.60(!!!) after influencing the decision to go Windows Phone? Does not make much sense to me.

Again, acting in other's companies' shareholders' interests is illegal for board members, and IIRC punishable by fines and prison time.

Maybe someone from Finland can tell us if the media outlet you referenced is more like the New York Times or a tabloid trying to cash in on a controversy while peddling conspiracy theories.

And the largest holder of Nokia shares has Microsoft as one of their largest holdings...

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nok/institutional-holdings

http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/institutional-portfolio/dodge--...

So between you and me, we uncovered more than the entire Finnish press with a few minutes of web searching?

This is looking more and more like a thread in /r/conspiracy.

Anyway, I don't know what Dodge & Cox achieved if they really influenced anything, Nokia stock went from ~$11 to $1.60 to $8 after the acquisition, and whatever Microsoft share price gained during the same time, it wasn't because of the Nokia acquisition or Windows Phone.

Here is another article (in Finnish), telling the same story, by Kauppalehti, the largest business-oriented newspaper in Finland.

http://www.kauppalehti.fi/etusivu/elop+ajoi+vanjoen+ohi+kalk...

>If Microsoft had the ability to install their moles as CEOs, why don't they do the same thing to Samsung, Apple, Google, HTC, etc. etc.?

It's possible that Microsoft had the ability to "install a mole" to Nokia but not other major cell phone companies.

Considering the choice of images on their front page, their current target seems to be more niche. Number of open source, Nokia, Maemo/Meego enthusiasts is probably big enough to give their sales a decent start.

Best wishes to Jolla. We truly deserve to have free-as-in-free-speech phones.

On the homepage "Jolla.com" it says: Jolla is powered by Sailfish OS, a truly open and distinct mobile operating system. Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface and load the phone with top Android™ apps.

So it is a phone since they call it a phone. :)

Imagine the difference had they said "Jolla is a smart phone powered by Sailfish OS, a truly open and distinct mobile operating system. Navigate effortlessly with the gesture-based user interface and load it with top Android™ apps." rather than bury the most important point on the whole website as a single word at the end of a long paragraph full of technical jargon.

That would qualify as calling it a phone. Better still would be "Jolla is a smart phone", dispensing with 28 unnecessary words.

Hopefully somebody at their end has the homepage up in an editor and can make the fix.

Agreed although I would push them further to communicate the value proposition for me as a potential customer. Why do I care? Why do I need a Jolla smart phone? What makes it so different? Skip the features and tell me how it's going to change my life and the way I do things for the better.

I totally agree with you... and my comment was in no way a praise for their marketing team. I actually couldn't tell from the image if it was a phone or not. I had to actually hunt for the word phone. It could have been an 'iPod Touch' clone.

My first impression, thought Jolla is a user interface skin build on top of Sailfish OS due to the highlight of "gesture based".

Beyond that simple statement, I'd agree with Jason. My first impression upon reading their webpage was "why?" Scrolling through I didn't find an answer. No differentiator in apps, function, power, memory or price.

I've often been wrong when I wondered that about a product, for this once I genuinely would like to know if there's an answer to the question. Why a new phone called Jolla?

I'm confused too. I don't understand if they are a manufacturer selling the phone directly to customers, or if they are an OEM selling to carriers. It looks like it is different than android, but it runs android apps? Is this another skin for android that is tied to the physical device?

Here, use this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6809444

Right now there are 50+ comments that all seem to be some variation of 'WTF'. Whose hardware is up & running sailfish? Or is this more vapourware? The page looks pre-launch still...

We'll notify you when Jolla is available to order... [?]

Not all, it is perfectly possible to read this as saying that a phone running Jolla is capable of running Android apps.

It's entirely possible to interpret the blurb as saying that Jolla is some kind of framework running on an OS called Sailfish, which adds Android compatibility and a gesture-based UI.

You might as well complain that they are launching in Finland.

You don't seem to understand anything about the context or audience for this phone at the present time.

> You don't seem to understand anything about the context or audience for this phone at the present time.

Neither do I. Since the website didn't, do you care to explain?

It is launching in Finland, do you think it is meant for you to buy it for Mom instead of an iPhone today?

If we don't understand the context or audience it's the fault of the site not the people confused by it.

I agree. I guessed quickly that it was a phone but all the networking junk it was sitting on top of in the top photo made me wonder if it was supposed to be something else. The first two questions I ask about anything technical (consumer product, programming language, branch of mathematics, ...) are 'what is this?' and 'when would I use this?' and it's depressing how poorly most advertising/documentation answers those.

It's important because it's a unique OS. Hardware while innovative, isn't radically different from the rest (except for the other half idea).

do you really need it spelled out that it's a phone??