This sounds like one of those "the sky is not falling" reviews of a Maemo phone in 2009, that ignores the (pretty huge) flaws of the platform because the author is a fan.
You can see hints in this review:
It should be is easy to search the web, enter URLs, open new tabs, save bookmarks etc. All of this can be done with the current browser in SailfishOS. The browser seems to work pretty fast and flawlessly. We heard at the launch event that the rendering engine is Gecko (same as in Firefox) so it is likely to have good support for HTML5 features. However in terms of usability, Chrome for Android is still the best mobile browser we’ve used so far. In particular the SailfishOS browser does not seem to have support for landscape mode. Hopefully while SailfishOS matures, the browser will grow to be more polished as well.
So.. the whole point of this phone is HTML5 apps. Yet Chrome is a more usable browser, and the author is hopeful the native browser "will grow to be more polished as well".
Android apps can be run using Alien Dalvik (probably some sort of virtual machine layer). You can either get both free and paid apps from the bundled Yandex store
No mention at all of the huge problems with this approach: this means no Google Play Services, and it removes all motivation for developers to build native apps: they can just point users at the Android version. (Also, Yandex has an Android store?!)
> So.. the whole point of this phone is HTML5 apps.
Pretty bizarre interpretation, perhaps you're thinking of Firefox OS? Jolla includes an Android runtime, and also has its own native applications, it's clearly not all about HTML5.
No-one said the whole point of the phone is HTML5 apps. The reviewer thinks HTML5 apps are the future, that's all. Native Sailfish apps are Qt based; with android apps as a secondary thing, presumably to kick-start the platform while they try to build an ecosystem. (Which makes sense, developers won't come unless people are using it but people won't use it if there are no apps.)
Yeah, that's probably a fair point. It wasn't clear until I looked at the architecture diagram, though.
Native Sailfish apps are Qt based; with android apps as a secondary thing, presumably to kick-start the platform while they try to build an ecosystem. (Which makes sense, developers won't come unless people are using it but people won't use it if there are no apps.)
I'm guessing that was Blackberry's strategy too. Didn't work for them - be interesting to see how well it works here.
Technically no vendor can offer something exceptionally different from hardware point of view. Bazillion megapixels, bazillion megaherz, bazillion cores and etc. - nobody cares about that. It takes decent pictures - good enough. It is not camera with lens replacement anyway. It works reasonably fast - good enough, I take it. Replaceable parts(1) - meh I don't care unless I can attach lens but then it is mirrorless camera not smartphone. It doesn't have my favorite app (twitter, vine, endomondo, hangouts, skype... name whatever else is important for you) - I don't need it.
Basically software ate hardware. Now let's talk about software. Development tools for Android are good enough but far from perfect. iOS tools are better, Qt tools are better (at least for me), Windows tools are better, HTML tools are better. The only important advantage Android has its openness. iOS lose because of that (2), Blackberry lose because of that and Windows will lose because of that (IMHO). Jolla are much more open here but are they open enough? Does it matter anymore? Firefox OS is in much better position as a lot of people have explored using HTML for apps and writing app for Firefox OS is basically packaging it and you have app. Most probably you don't need to write app at all if you already have responsive design website.
Android problem - it is dependent on Google very much and it is both good and bad. It is good for users as they get good experience, it is bad as they are getting closed into Google's world and I doubt that it is good thing.
My question is: what next smartphone OS should offer to be considered winning?
1) Replaceable parts are still good thing if it will create market where you can buy cheaper parts to replace broken ones or outdated ones.
2) iOS market share in the world is low but pretty good in USA. So I'm using "lose" very loosely.
Just checking ... you know why Microsoft has won so many wars? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
You could almost always upgrade to Microsoft without losing your old data and programs. CP/M programs could be ran virtually unmodified on DOS. Lotus documents could be opened in Office. But if anything used special Microsoft-only features them the customer would need to keep using Microsoft products.
Assuming customers will only upgrade to a new system that can run their old programs, and open their old documents, then eventually they'd all end up stuck with Microsoft.
Obviously, not every customer is like that, and iOS customers won't have a reason to switch, but it's not a terrible strategy.
Offering Android means that users can upgrade from an Android phone. Offering Qt means that users will get trapped (at least, until there's enough users that Android makers start trying to fight back, but that's a good problem to have).
Just checking if I got it right: Google with Android is successfully using Microsoft strategy.
In that case Firefox OS is in the best position to compete against Android. FxOS phones can be very cheap as well. But is that enough to make it next big thing in smartphone's market?
> Technically no vendor can offer something exceptionally different from hardware point of view.
Just because vendors are falling over themselves to makes Iphone clones, doesn't mean there's no other way.
Personally, the whole current smartphone scene leaves me cold, because no-one is making hardware for me. I want a small, robust phone I can put in my pocket and forget about. Something with a big fragile screen is completely useless to me. I don't really care what software it's running - if I have to leave it at home because I'm afraid of breaking the screen, then the software is irrelevant.
Huh? There are thousands and thousands of devices just like that. They don't make the news though because they're boring and cheap. Head past your nearest phone shop and you can find a huge variety of those kind of phones at incredibly low prices ($20 prepaid kind of prices).
Some people probably think you're biased because your comment promised a reveal of "(pretty huge) flaws" like the N900 (or rather, a Maemo phone in 2009) had.
1. I'm not aware of any especially terrible flaws in N900s, so I already don't know what you're talking about. The mention of the "flaws of the platform" makes me think you're just stealing the language from Elop that he used to describe Symbian.
2. The browser is not as good as Chrome on Android, and lacks landscape mode at release. This is a (pretty huge) flaw? I see it as a pretty minor (and likely temporary) flaw, which could be alleviated by using Chrome for Android on the device. You see it as a major flaw, because the "whole point of this phone is HTML5 apps." What?
3. The other flaw is that it is not an Android phone, and isn't tied into Google Play services. Is that a flaw on the iPhone, or just on the Jolla?
There was a promise in your comment that was not delivered on. In the end it was weird, like when somebody tells you how their ex-wife has been mounting a campaign of harassment against them for years - then as they describe the individual incidents in this campaign, you feel sorrier for the ex-wife by the minute.
Maybe explaining a couple of the "(pretty huge) flaws" of the N900 might help?
> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps.
What is the "long term"? Has somebody actually managed to build a native HTML5-based UI that isn't a laggy and clumsy piece of shit yet? For example, webOS looked great but even the simplest lists scrolled with less than 30 frames per second. The videos I've seen of FxOS don't show much promise either (although those are running on really low-end hardware).
I'm really skeptical that trying to shoehorn something called "hypertext markup language" and a generic web rendering engine like WebKit into a UI toolkit is ever going to work smoothly. Even on my desktop computer complex sites can work slowly at times. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
FxOS runs at 50+ FPS for pretty much all of the built-in UI, even on lower end phones like the Geeksphone Keon. Higher end phones are actually really fast, like the LG Fireweb (released in Brazil a couple weeks ago) and the GP Peak.
Think long-term. What could you conceivably do on the desktop that you can't do on the browser? Media recording and management? HTML5 is well on the way and someone compiled a functional version of FFMpeg in Javascript just recently. Storage? Security? Dropbox and more of the kind. We already have document management. The only thing I can think of right now is a render farm but we'll do that in the cloud anyway (even if the cloud is a desktop computer right next to you). I scoffed at the idea not too many months ago but I'm starting to see how mobile and desktop are converging, and I think it's going to happen faster than any of us expect due to consumer demand.
Edit: thinking of program like Final Cut: someone will figure out how to do the hardcore processing over-the-wire using Thunderbolt or something. Dumb terminals, welcome back!
It's impossible to predict things long-term. I mean, maybe we'll eventually get web applications that look and feel exactly like native apps. But maybe we'll still be stuck with kludgy, hacky, JS/HTML5-based apps that have rendering problems depending on your browser, that load in ugly chunks, that save your data to some proprietary cloud, that fail at concurrency, that don't integrate with your OS's multitasking workflow (Spaces, Mission Control), that take 5 times as long to run, and that stop working as soon as you go into a tunnel. And that's only from the user perspective; as a developer, I don't look forward to the nightmare of being stuck in a Javascript universe. I love being able to pick and choose from so many different frameworks, libraries, and languages when developing native apps; with Javascript, as soon as I try to do something simple, I inevitably end up with an SO answer that looks like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/950087/how-to-include-a-j...
(And no, "use JQuery" is not an answer; it's a symptom.)
Plus, it just feels shitty to not be able to own any of your tools. I don't want to rent my applications from some multinational corporation. I bought them, so they should be mine. (Yeah, yeah, nobody really owns anything anymore, but at least the bloody bits are on my drive!)
In short, if web apps are the future, I hope that a) they're only one of several commonly used paradigms, and b) we have something better than a browser to run them in.
I don't think it's better: I work with heavy media files and it worries me when Apple makes OSX a bit more stupid every release. But I have faith that as developers we'll make it work (maybe the industry moves to Linux, who knows). But I also LOVE the idea that my mobile phone or some tiny gadget I wear around my neck is the key to my data, and I can rock up to any monitor or use any display, glasses, microprojector whatever. I just see the changes coming, where iOS and OSX are merging slowly. It's too early to say what this is going to mean for pro developers/users.
All of your points are completely valid today. I would come back in 5 years and see that probably all of those are achievable by the browser and Javascript.
Eg:
>1) Anything low level hardware (reading data via USB, or pushing data into HDMI, for instance)
I would expect that a Nexus device can do Chromecast from browser screen, if not today then soon.
>2) Interacting with ANY hardware that's not explicitly supported by Javascript. Try creating an HTML5/JS scanner app.
You mean like, taking a photo and processing it? You can do that right now.
>3) Writing super-fast CPU-specific code, think Assembly language. That's the reason there are no HTML5 apps of the Photoshop caliber
Yet, agreed. But soon - only CPU is slowing it down, not the technology.
>4) Disk access. Try creating a Javascript-based antivirus. Or an app that watches for changes in a certain directory.
There won't be a filesystem as we know it. The 'cloud' and browser-accessible storage will be all we need.
>5) Internal network access. Try writing a JS app interacting with your localhost or TCP/IP or UDP.
> I would expect that a Nexus device can do Chromecast from browser screen, if not today then soon.
No, that's not what I meant. Pushing any data into HDMI, controlled by the app, not the screencasting.
> You mean like, taking a photo and processing it? You can do that right now.
No, I mean connecting to a scanner, scanning a document. You can't do it now. And don't tell me taking a snapshot with a built-in camera is the same thing
> There won't be a filesystem as we know it. The 'cloud' and browser-accessible storage will be all we need.
Sorry, I wasn't aware you could predict the future, and I thought we were talking about now.
> Sockets, it's possible now.
No, your JS app can't access the internal network, unless you expose it to the internet with TCP/IP. Sockets only let you connect to public servers. And no UDP (at least not explicitly).
Ah well, I was talking about the future. You're correct about the above you mention, and regarding sockets I was of course referring to TCP/IP. I'm keeping an eye on the Jolla/ChromeOS/FireFox OS types, more than iOS as I think there will be significant changes to allow the above and more.
IMHO that's list what you can't do "with the browser" not "on the browser". If browser is somehow exposed to interfaces of peripherals/devices/etc there is no reason why you can't do that "on browser". Yes, you can't do that with browser alone, but you can do that on browser.
I'm curious about this POV from folks of getting mobile web apps to look and feel like mobile native apps being a prerequisite for success. I just don't think this is true. After all, desktop web apps look and feel nothing like desktop native apps.
I too believe that mobile web will one day overtake mobile native apps for most peoples' daily usage. I just don't think it'll look or act anything like what we're currently doing. Luke Wroblewski gives a great talk about the early days of a new medium being an awkward state where we try to shoehorn what worked in the last medium into it. At some point we'll figure out a design and usage patten for the mobile web that'll make a world of sense in hindsight. We're just not there yet IMO and of course I have no idea what this looks like.
> At Seravo we hold the belief that in the long term, browser based HTML5 apps will be more important than native apps.
People have been saying that for 5 years + , the "future" still has a long way to go. By the way , that's what the iphone was supposed to be, a phone where devs write browser apps... we all know what happened.
"When it [iPhone] first came out in early 2007, there were no apps you could buy from outside developers, and Jobs initially resisted allowing them," writes Isaacson. "He didn't want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity."
What puzzles me about Jolla and it's Sailfish OS is the constant emphasis on being "truly open" when in fact the sources of the OS are nowhere to be found. They point you to projects such as Mer and say Sailfish OS is based on it but by the same logic Apple is "truly open" because OS X is based on Darwin.
As someone who spent quite a lot of time getting QtWebKit built and kept up-to-date on Mer, both for Qt 4.8 and 5.x, I'm somewhat torn to see this:
> We heard at the launch event that the rendering engine is Gecko
On one hand, I feel a little sad. On the other hand, I can appreciate the idea of going with a browser engine that isn't as big a political playing field as WebKit. (Or its Google-fork: Blink.) The reasons that led to this decision might be interesting.
Interesting. I remember that Meego went back and forth between WebKit and Gecko, but that was a long time ago, I would also be interested to hear how things ended up that way.
> I remember that Meego went back and forth between WebKit and Gecko
I know at least one very good reason, from personal pain.
Meego preceded Qt 5.0. QtWebKit was not part of official Qt releases until 5.1, and in 4.x the situation was even worse. Back then QtWebKit was always a second-class citizen. The browser engine was a separate "Qt component". This meant that all releases were done individually, outside and out of pace with the Qt proper. Any release lagged behind the Qt releases, taking anywhere from weeks to months to catch up and work with the most recent Qt release. I got the idea that the webkit team was severely undermanned and overworked.
This meant that for any product that wanted to use QtWebKit, the product manager had to make an early decision to lock the version of used Qt just to ensure that QtWebKit was available. (Customers demanded a working browser engine with bells and whistles.) So from a purely practical point of view it made sense to decouple the browser engine and Qt release at architectural level.
No wonder Meego hovered between the two options. They had the choice of not using the latest Qt releases but having a more finely integrated browser engine - or they could go with the latest Qt, a decoupled browser engine and doing a horrible amount of additional integration work to keep Qt and Gecko in sync.
As one can imagine, neither of those options is particularly appealing.
Minor nitpick: I don't know how to say "Jolla". I mean I know that "Jolla" is pronounced "Hoya" in European Spanish ("Hosha" in Argentinian), but in most European languages it'd be "Yolla" with a soft "j" and the naive English pronunciation would be "Djolla". I don't know which was the intended one.
Not that it really matters I suppose, but why go to all that trouble building an apparently lovely device and giving it a slightly cumbersome name?
Jolla means "light boat" in Finnish. I guess it's a tongue in cheek for the Elop's burning platform speech, where Jolla is the light boat getting a away from it.
(Agree that for global products, people should prefer names that are easier to pronounce)
It also occurred to me that with Nokia's history as a rubber manufacturer they're bound to have made rubber rafts at some point (which would indeed be called `jolla').
Yes and if the French prononunced it like it's written it would sound like Neek, which is similar to the french word 'Nique' which is a slang for fucking
Finn here. If you consider the Finnish way the correct one, then it's "yolla" (or "yoh-lla"). To be clear, the "o" is short, and doesn't bend towards "u" like it would in "yo mama so fat".
Yes, and they on purpose didn't intend it to sound like the Finnish pronunciation of Jolla. That's what I've heard. But Finnish speaking Jolla crew often fall back to the naturally sounding way, that's why you hear them saying Yolla.
I can't believe that no pixels can be seen on a 4,5" screen with a resolution of 960x540. That would be a worse density than my > 3 year old HTC desire. A mistake in the article?
This entire piece sounds overly positive about the thing. We get it, it's a real Linux phone, but the hardware is lackluster for 2013. That shitty screen resolution sounds like the final nail in the coffin for me.
Screen resolution is literally the last thing I care about. Give me an extra hour of battery life & I'll take a lower rs display. Give me an extra day of battery life & I'm in heaven.
These people need to make money selling the actual phone. Comparing Nexus pricing makes no sense (well, it does of course from the consumers perspective...)
Nokia Lumia 520 which has similar resolution (480 x 800) is 79$ and in fact you can get one for 49$ today. Off contract. I know that HN is not fond of WP but just comparing hardware here.
To be honest i believe that all this retina bullshit that was started by apple is too much. Really, i am wondering how good the battery life of my phone would be without a fullhd display.. on a tiny size... that's just stupid, most people just wouldn't notice a lower resolution in everyday use but they would notice improved battery life.
To me the resolution battle is the same BS that the megapixel count on photo sensors is. It's mainly marketing talk to sell devices.
So please, i don't care if the phone doesn't have fullhd, and i also don't need 5" displays.. or a 40 MP camera, i dont need octacore cpus or opengl XYZ capability. I want battery life, please work on the f*cking battery life!!
p.s.: my "rant" doesn't mean that the jolla has a good battery life, of course i wouldn't know about that. Just addressing my main problem with smartpones.
That's 330 ppi by my calculation. The iphone has the same pixel density and it is very much good. I don't see the reason to push 1080 pixels on my tiny 4.5 or even 5 inch phone.
This is the first post that really sparked my imagination about The Other Half. Lots of possibilities to build dedicated devices to different environments and tasks.
Jolla really should make their marketing material more concrete to target their true early adopter audience.
I have an idea for The Other Half: an Xbee 802.15.4 module that could facilitate a distributed telecommunications network between mobile handsets. I have my eye on David Rowe's open source codec2 to support voice calls because it can achieve telephone quality at 1400 bits-per-second, and I think that at this bandwidth multiple calls can be relayed efficiently, (and _securely_), though a mesh network. If a handset has WiFi access then calls can then route through the internet and path around the world. If we want to continue to use the antiquated practice of telephone numbers as identifiers, then we can use cryptographic primatives and a blockchain, (like bitcoin), to prove telephone number-handset authenticity on the new peer-to-peer network.
Combine this with a Jolla phone for a connection to a conventional cellular network and perhaps a handset could move seamlessly through peer-to-peer calling, handset-to-VoIP calling, and the PTSN.
Then the day may come where we can finally do away with these telecommunications companies, and have a decentralized and secure-by-design phone system once and for all.
According to the article the biggest problem seems to be Internet-connectivity, the reception is sometimes bad and it has problems connecting to WLAN. The browser is also quite slow and needs improvements.
I do Qt development for a living, as well as iOS work, so the Jolla has my interest piqued. This review is overly effusive but I can't shake the feeling that I really, really want one to see where this platform could go. It certainly doesn't look boring.
Interesting timing: I received my first FirefoxOS device yesterday. It works. It cost $80.
Looking at this phone, which targets a far higher price point, I am forced to consider their differences: Contribute development effort towards getting the rest of the planet online and empowered? ... or help nords preserve their heritage of mobile device architecture?
Mozilla and Wikimedia are working hard to provide equal access to all under an open platform. Considering the growth trajectory for the developing world (widely recognized by macro-economists), we can each commercially justify time investment in the FirefoxOS platform. As the web's new primary class of access devices, mobile devices for the developing world are a big part of our shared future. Let's keep it open.
Meh. I'd wait for the first few objective reviews.
I lost interest when they said things like "there is one hardware feature that is unique to Jolla: The Other Half [...] a concept of user-changeable smart back cover."
Surely replaceable plastic covers have been around for decades and they are mostly associated with low-end feature phones... or really old Nokias.
So you lost interest... and stopped reading completely? Had you read any further you would have realised that the unique feature is that there's both a power connector and an I2C interface available to those back covers. It's a pretty brilliant concept - you could interface with the whole host of cool chips which use I2C, or even build yourself a little robot chassis.
Power connector like the wireless chargers by Nokia etc? Not sure what a I2C interface is...
My point is that I would prefer objective reviews, not glowing praise from fans etc. The key question for is not what tech did they pack in a small screen device, but does it actually feel better to use than the incumbents.
If you don't know what an I2C interface is, then you're not in a position to make the criticism that you made. If you were at all interested in expanding your knowledge, a simple google search would reveal that it's a ubiquitous serial interface for communicating with peripheral chips. All that requires more work than just blindly making critical comments on an online message board though, so why bother?
Reading this I had to repeatedly scroll up to make absolutely sure I wasn't just reading a Jolla press release... I'd love for this to be as great as it's described here, but I'll be waiting for an actual impartial review.
It's interesting but looking at the video at the bottom of the article it looks like swipe gestures on the photo album lag considerably. Has anyone had the chance to play with it?
Whenever a Windows phone is presented, there are pictures of phones that have more square corners than other phones, and flashy colors like yellow and orange.
It seems to be almost a requirement of a phone with the Windows software, to have colorful and squary hardware.
Is that a coincidence, or a sort of design convention or requirement?
EDIT: Oops, apparently it does not run Windows. I saw the tiles in the screenshot and flashy colors, so thought it was Windows phone... Sorry...
This is not requerment. First generation of WP7 phones had few curvy models, but square corners was a trend already. Flashy colours were popularised by Nokia, they had similar design before switching to Windows Phone, so HTC and Huawey just copied them for WP models. Samsung Ativ S is example of curvy black WP8 phone.
More like Elop came in, killed the entire MeeGo pipeline (except for the one phone they were contractually obligated to launch), and then used the MeeGo hardware to launch his WP7 stuff sooner.
You can see hints in this review:
It should be is easy to search the web, enter URLs, open new tabs, save bookmarks etc. All of this can be done with the current browser in SailfishOS. The browser seems to work pretty fast and flawlessly. We heard at the launch event that the rendering engine is Gecko (same as in Firefox) so it is likely to have good support for HTML5 features. However in terms of usability, Chrome for Android is still the best mobile browser we’ve used so far. In particular the SailfishOS browser does not seem to have support for landscape mode. Hopefully while SailfishOS matures, the browser will grow to be more polished as well.
So.. the whole point of this phone is HTML5 apps. Yet Chrome is a more usable browser, and the author is hopeful the native browser "will grow to be more polished as well".
Android apps can be run using Alien Dalvik (probably some sort of virtual machine layer). You can either get both free and paid apps from the bundled Yandex store
No mention at all of the huge problems with this approach: this means no Google Play Services, and it removes all motivation for developers to build native apps: they can just point users at the Android version. (Also, Yandex has an Android store?!)