It's also open source and I'm sure they have a lot of goodwill within the community given their history, so that might alleviate the problem somewhat.
I have a Blackberry Z30[1] and I don't think I could go back to the "old way" of using a smartphone. BB 10 feels like a true smartphone experience, as subjective as that is.
[1] http://ca.blackberry.com/smartphones/blackberry-z30.html
A non-discoverable interface on a device this late to the party is not going to be good for market-share.
Maybe BlackBerry should attack the problem the same way Coke did, by conducting a (longer-term) OS interface challenge.
[1]http://www.slate.com/articles/business/rivalries/2013/08/pep...
At the store, I picked it up, turned it around a few times to confirm that there are indeed no buttons, then tried tapping the screen all over but it stubbornly displayed only a screensaver.
Later someone told me that I was supposed to rapidly tap twice in one place (like a double-click on the mouse) to get to the home screen. Nothing in the unit's physical design or software suggested this.
That can't be good for BB.
It looks pretty clean. It should appeal to the people who were buying Nokia's Harmattan and Meego devices. If Jolla can pick up a majority of the Qt apps that had been developed for those platforms and grow that developer community, they may have a chance.
It will take at least a year, and probably some more hardware to tell where Jolla is going and if it will be successful. There are several dimensions to measure that success: Can Jolla pick up many of the distribution channels, and their customers, in Europe that previously favored Nokia? Can they penetrate the China market, as they appear to be aiming to do?