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."

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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!

 

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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!

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