Jolla announce their first sailfish OS phone: Arriving this year for €399!

   For those of you who don't remember Jolla, they're a little start up which formed after Nokia cut their ties with Meego. Meego was an open source operating system which was being made as a joint project between Intel and Nokia. Obviously there was a lot f work which had gone into the OS and it did seem a shame that it was all canned when Nokia headed down the Windows Phone route. 

   That's why Jolla, pronounce Yolla, took it upon themselves, as mainly ex-Nokia employees, to build on the solid foundation which had been laid. With a few changes here and there, such as Meego being renamed Sailfish OS and a slight overhaul to how the operating system looks, we've now reached the point where the guys have shown off their first ever smartphone which will be arriving later in the year!

   The recent Twitter campaign which employed the hashtag #IAmTheOtherHalf was actually very clever because the phone will be customisable on the rear so the device will look however you want! The cool feature is that the changes you make to the backplates will be automatically reflected in the on screen UI!

   As for the phone itself it's simply called the 'Jolla' and it features a 4.5-inch Estrade (raised) display of unspecified resolution, 16GB of internal storage which will be microSD expandable, '4G' support, a user replaceable battery and an 8MP rear camera, there does seem to be a front one too, but that was mentioned in the relatively brief spec list! One cool feature is that there is some sort of recognition of which colour the backplate is and this adapts the visual theme of the OS to match, creating "your other half, exactly as you want it to be." The OS itself is buttonless and is entirely gesture based, so this takes WebOS to the next level and does look very fresh on the surface of it! One feature which users will undoubtedly love is that app support won't be an issue because these guys are going to have an Android app client built into the phone from day one! 

   Things sound promising for this phone, but we're not sure if the underdog can win in today's world, but we'd love to see this phone do well enough to at least spawn a sequel because these guys really seem to have great design and a great vision! Check out the video below from Jolla's Marc Dillon to see the phone and if you're interested head over here to look at the three pre-order options!

Via tweet below and TheVerge.

Finally. #IAmTheOtherHalf. jolla.com twitter.com/JollaHQ/status…
— Jolla (@JollaHQ) May 20, 2013

Read More

In Other News: 03/05/2013.

• Jolla have had a bit of a switch up in the CEO department, again. The original CEO was Jussi Hurmola, he then gave up the post to focus on software development and then the title was given to Marc Dillon. It seems that the situation has repeated itself because Dillon has decided to focus on software too and so Jolla's new CEO from the 6th of this month will be Tomi Pienimäki!
  Via PhoneArena.

• Barnes and Nobel have already been busy reducing the prices on their products this week in the UK, but it seems that they have added Play Store support to their Nook HD and Nook HD+. This makes these devices much more attractive and gives them a tonne more apps!
  Via AndroidBeat.

• Nokia's much rumoured Lumia 928 has possibly been snapped at an internal concert at Nokia! Head over to the source link to see if you think it's legit! We're not quite convinced!
  Via PhoneArena.

• It's fair enough if you're a little apprehensive about splashing out on a Firefox OS phone, but if you want to get a flavour for what it'd be like then download this Firefox attachment so you can experience what it feels like right from your browser!
  Via Engadget.

• The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is finally receiving its update to Android 4.1.2 on Verizon in the USA, just as AT&T's original Galaxy Note gets Jelly Bean too!
  Via PhoneArena and Slashgear. 

• Asus have launched their seven inch Memo Pad tablet in the UK! The device is up for sale for £129 and is a relative bargain. It seems as though the low end tablet market is really hotting up!
  Via ITProPortal.

• The Samsung Galaxy S Plus is also getting Jelly Bean in select markets, more on specifics when we get them!
  Via AndroidCommunity.

Read More

Jolla announce another little update to their plans!

   Today Jolla Mobile, the saviours of Meego, have announced their initial plans for their fledgling project!

   The company plans to start by forming a new ecosystem in alliance with 'leading players in the industry' centred in Hong Kong. To quote the company directly they will utilize;

 "The new fully productised mobile operating system, based on MeeGo and codenamed “Sailfish”, will be ready for licensing by other device manufacturers, design houses and service companies in spring 2013. Sailfish builds on and contributes to existing open source projects such as the Qt Project and Mer Core, and due to those roots the new OS will be open to community involvement and participation."

Read More

20/08/2012

Jolla to introduce Android app compatibility and some more news on their phone!

   We've covered Jolla mobile quite a few times here on TheTechFella and regular readers will know that the company are in the middle of creating a MeeGo powered phone. One of the fundamental problems with MeeGo or any new OS, is that there is a severe lack of apps. Apps recently have become one of the key selling points to any phone buyer.

   Jolla seems to appreciate this and, according to ArcticStartup, the company plans to utilize Android's app ecosystem to ensure there is a lot of apps for their future buyers. This information comes from a recent interview between Jussi Hurmola, the CEO of Jolla and Tero Lehto from Finnish 3T publication, where the latter asked the former how he plans to tackle the problem of building an app ecosystem for a phone. Hurmola reportedly said he plans to use Android apps (but he didn't want to officially announce that yet) as well as Qt and HTML5-applications all through OpenMobile's ACL (application compatibility layer). 

   Hurmola also promised a new UI which is 'more modern' than both Android's and iOS' so if they can live up to that then they may have a challenger on their hands! Another tasty little tidbit was that the device will have a screen larger than 3.5" so everything is sounding promising at the moment!

   Given the huge support MeeGo generated when Nokia announced their N9, Jolla may well have a chance. But, it'll be interesting to see what their device looks like when it gets announced later this autumn, that device will literally make or break this company!

In other news:

• As part of the restructuring of OnLive, the streaming gaming provider has laid off half of their workforce and OnLive all of tyheir their assets will now become part of 'a newly-formed company'. This will mean that HTC's infrequently mentioned $40 million investment will be lost and that'll be another round of bad news for the companies accountants!

• 500,000 Android users in China have been infected with a malware called SMSZombie. Thankfully for those of us outside of China this isn't too big of an issue because the malware exploits a vulnerability in China Mobile's payment systems so it shouldn't affect people in other parts of the world!

• Apple and Samsung have almost finished testifying in their cases and the jury is poised to start deliberating, but the pair were given one last chance to talk it out. Guess what! There was no agreement so far, but Bloomberg believes that the CEOs of both companies, Tim Cook and Kwon Oh Hyun, will hold a telephone conference call to see if any resolution can be agreed before we give full power to the jury. 

•  LG's Optimus Vu will soon be heading outside of Japan and South Korean and will land in the USA and 'select countries' in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. The 'phablet' will be refreshed with a Quad-core Tegra 3 processor for most people but the US version will have a 1.5Ghz Snapdragon S4 processor. All we know about availability or pricing is that these will be ready for September!

• Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Note 10.1 has been taken apart by iFixit and they've decided that should anything go wrong with the device it'll be nice and easy to repair! Unlike the new Retina Macbooks and the latest iPad, both of which iFixit criticised for the low likelihood of a successful repair.

• Netflix has been on a recent world wide march lately as they've rolled out there service throughout some Western parts of Europe and announce Scandinavian availability is coming soon. And it seems that this is coming good for the company because they've announced today that they have already managed to rack up a million subscibers throughout the UK and Ireland! Not bad going!

• On a similar theme Barnes and Noble have announced that they too will be bringing their lines of eReaders and content to the UK starting from this autumn. Their address will be nook.com.uk if and when they get their storefront up and running!

• And finally, the Galaxy S3-esque device pictured below is supposedly te upcoming Galaxy player and a full list of specs is available on the picture below! And hopefully the device will make an appearance at IFA in a couple of weeks!

 

Read More

18/07/2012

ZTE announce the Grand X; perhaps not the 'most advanced gaming handset'.

   Zte have just announced what they previously claimed to be the world's most advanced game smartphone. We're not entirely convinced it's exactly that but it is a very appealing little device.

   On board there's Android 4.0.4 so it's a solid build of Ice Cream Sandwich, but the real news here is that it's completely vanilla Android!!!! Thank you ZTE!

   Under the hood things are very mid-range; there's a Dual Core Tegra 2 chipset, a 4.3″ qHD (960×540) screen, 5 Megapixel camera and a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera. We have already seen this device a couple of months ago at Mobile World Congress. But back then it was known as the Mimosa X. 

   ZTE have also been touting HD Voice and HD video capture, along with Dolby sound and the usual set of sensors and connectivity options. Initially you'll have 4GB of storage but thankfully there's a microSD card for all your baggage.

   The device will be available at the start of August for £190 on pay as you go from both Virgin and Phones4U.

In other news:

• Windows Phone somehow has managed to steal 4% of the US smartphone market, which is surprisingly positive return from Microsoft's dead OS.
• O2 are apologising to their customers for the outage we reported recently. For affected customers they're giving you 10% off your bill and for every customer on O2 they have a £10 voucher to spend in store!
• Sony have announced a little Walkman powered by Android, we recommend considering the Galaxy Player before you look at the Sony device.
• Continuing the Sony news; there have been reports the company is preparing to release the Xperia Z. The device is meant to be top of the range in every respect! We'll let you know when we hear more!
• The Huawei G300 has now got some ICS!
• Jolla and their Meego projects have announced that they plan to lock down the Kernel and prevent custom ROMS on their device when it hits to market. That's a shame as that'll probably put an end to quite a lot of interest, especially from developers.

Read More

10/07/2012

RIM claim to own the qwerty market and make interesting comments about Chinese production.

   “We own the QWERTY market" is the claim today from RIM CEO Torsten Heins. It is this confidence that helps explains the company's plans to produce a full-touch BB10 device before unleashing the qwerty's. Heins' exact words were "That’s why we’re targeting the full-touch market first.”

   RIM see this as a good opportunity to diversify and in a way this is a fresh start for the company and hopefully they will be able to produce modern and stylish phones which will change the company's fortunes. 

   As always the company is relying on their comprehensive messaging services to win through and we can expect to see both qwerty and touchscreen devices in short succession in early 2013!

   There was one other interesting tidbit from today's shareholder Q&A in Waterloo. Heins was asked why the company doesn't produce phones in China to save money and his response was that he doesn't want to risk software leaks and industrial espionage. We don't know if this is a genuine concern or not really. Noone else seems to have this sort of problem, well not since Nortel cleaned up their act.

In other news:

• Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has promised to leave no space in the market where Apple is unchallenged. They have pledged to fight Apple on the software and hardware front in a head to head battle. This could get interesting!
• Kickstarter is coming to the UK in the fall!
• Android 4.1 Jelly Bean has had it's source code released to he AOSP, so expect custom ROMS in the very near future!
• It's been reported today that Nokia had given Jolla patents surrounding Meego but Nokia has denied this has happened today.
• AMD has suggested there will be an 11% drop in revenue in Q2 2012, as Intel wrestles more marketshare off of the company.
• Microsoft have proudly boasted that they are collecting royalties from 70% of Android devices today.

Read More

09/07/2012

JollaMobile plans to give Meego the chance it deserves!

   Now many of you out there may have heard of Nokia and their much heralded N9. The N9 was the first, and only, smartphone to run Meego; a pleasant little OS which was widely described as a 'breath of fresh air' when it was shown off last year. Meego itself took the best of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin operating systems and merged them into one complete package specifically designed for ease of use and elegance. 

   Despite the N9 introducing beautiful industrial design and a great new OS, there was a problem and his name was Stephen Elop. You may know him as the man who was responsible for ending his company's work on Symbian, Meego and, the all but complete, Meltemi. Instead he jumped straight into the arms of his ex-employer, Microsoft and their little OS, Windows Phone 7. 

   As you can probably tell, I personally am a fan of diversity; Firefox OS, WebOS, Meego, Tizen, Bada, BB10/QNX and the like, are all great operating systems but they're either being created as we speak or have been all but archived after poor initial sales (yes HP we're looking at you).

   But, in the face of adversity a team of ex-Nokia employees have created a small start up called Jolla and they plan to create their 'Own hardware and own OS based on ‪#MeeGo‬'. The software will be able to run on both ARM and X86 processors so, in theory, there's quite a range of products this company could come out with, but they've made it clear that their initial focus is smartphones.

   The only problem is that the company has doesn't currently have any products to show off; they're working on something for release later this year, but it's been made clear on their Twitter page that they have investors and they are looking at possibilities such as Kickstarter to get the company off the ground.

   This is a very interesting project and only time will tell if the company can build on the solid foundation laid by Nokia and Intel, but I have my fingers crossed for them!

   Ohh, for the record the name isn't pronounced the way you expect; it's spelt Jolla but the company has said 'it should be said with a sharp 'z' in the beginning, like 'zholla' or 'tjolla'!

In other news:

• Samsung has all but confirmed they are planning to launch a Windows RT tablet in the fall.
• Torsten Heins, RIM's CEO has explained his company's decision to delay BB10 saying that he could 'still see the seams' and he wanted the OS to be flawless.
• Blackberry's app world has hit 3 billion downloads.
• Hot on the heels of HTC's win against Apple in the UK courts, the same decision has been reached  regarding Samsung tablets... Not Guilty!!! So head out and buy all the Galaxy Tab's you want, you lucky Brits!
• A new Kindle Fire has been tipped for Q3 with a 1280x800, Nexus 7 matching, display.
• LG are reported to be using a bit more in house production as they seek to regain some smartphone market share.
• US mobile carriers were asked over 1.3million times for information about their customers by law enforcement agencies in the US of A!!!
• Nokia has today confirmed that there will be a Windows Phone for Verizon 'very soon' and the same timescale has been applied to the release of Nokia phones with 'Pureview' camera technology.
• Ohhh and that exploding Samsung Galaxy S3, turns out it was microwaved, that's why it exploded! The things people will do to get attention these days!

Read More