Jolla goes for crowdsourcing to produce Sailfish OS tablet, topped $380,000 goal on first day of campaign

Jolla , the Finnish smartphone startup founded by ex-Nokia employees and Meego are planning to enter into tablet market with 7.85" high resolution display tablet running on company's own open sourced operating system Sailfish OS 2.0. Jolla has already launched its first smartphone running on Sailfish OS earlier this year.

Jolla Tablet - Campaign

Jolla has taken path of crowd funding and managed to raise 160% of goal amount on the first day of launch of campaign on indiegogo. Jolla Tablet launch came just after 1 day when Nokia announced its N1 tablet with similar specifications. However, Jolla tablet will start shipping from second quarter of next year.  First 1000 tablets were up for pre order for $189 and next set of 1000 tablets were offered at a price of $199 both these segments are already sold out. At time of writing this post next 2000 tablets are up for $204 out of which 752 are already claimed.

A look at Jolla Tablet .


Jolla tablet will be powered by Quad core intel processor, 2 GB RAM and 32 GB ROM with memory card slot. Tablet will sport a 7.85" IPS screen with 330 ppi. 8.3 mm Device will be fuelled by 4300 mAh battery and will weigh 384 grams.  People can have their say on how they want their Jolla tablet to be designed through online forum .

Below is high level comparison of specifications of Jolla tablet, iPad Mini 3 , Nexus 9 and Nokia N1.

Jolla Specifications

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Jolla all set to enter India with first Sailfish OS powered phone,

Its nothing new to have a new OEM entering Indian smartphone market to make a place in one of the largest growing smartphone markets globally, but this entry is different , this is not another Chinese brand making entry with Android based smartphone running on multiple cores and priced below big brands to woo customers.

Its more than a year now when we posted about Jolla, Tizen , Ubuntu and Firefox OS . Jolla is already selling in European markets from last December , recently a tweet from company's official twitter account confirmed its plan to enter India soon with its smartphone named Jolla running on Sailfish OS.

#Jolla smartphone coming to India very soon, exclusively on @Snapdeal. Be the first to know at http://t.co/Utjql7BcXl pic.twitter.com/neLMqVo8zv
— Jolla (@JollaHQ) July 18, 2014

About Jolla:

Jolla is a Finnish startup from ex Nokia employees. A group of employees working on Meego OS from Nokia, Jolla revisited Meego kernel and stripped Meego with proprietary bits and added its own API layer with ability to support Android apps, Meego apps and Sailfish OS apps.

Sailfish is another Linux based Operating system (that paves way for Android applications) with a potential to become a alternate to Android. As it is developing its own app ecosystem with advantage to use already rich and widely popular Android ecosystem.

Jolla Camera UI

Sailfish has a swipe and gesture based User Interface hence no navigation buttons are present on Jolla. Jolla does not come with a loaded hardware but it promises to give user a clean and simple experience. Unique pull and select menu is something which makes sense to touch screen phones, you can swipe either side to go to Home screen from an app, On Home screen 9 large tiles are displayed showing your recent closed or running applications where user can even perform few actions based on app without actually opening it hence giving a new dimension to multitasking in phones. To close an app you have to just swipe from top to bottom and doing this gesture in reverse gives you updates from your social accounts. Jolla has been rolling out firmware updates frequently which is a good reason to be on Jolla.

Jolla 

Jolla

Specifications:

Processore: Qualcomm Dual core 1.4 GHz
Memory: 16 GB storage, 1 GB RAM, MicroSD slot
Display: 4.5" qHD display with Gorilla 2 Glass
Camera: 8 MP AF camera with LED flash, 2 MP front camera
Sensors: Proximity, Accelerometer, Gyro, E-Compass, Ambient light
Battery: 2100 mAh
Connectivity: GSM/3G/4G LTE

There is no word on pricing yet but it is confirmed that Jolla has inked deal with Snapdeal for selling the smartphone exclusively. It is available for 349 C which roughly translates to INR 28,530 but Jolla has to come up with some strategy as Indian market is already flooded with number of phones running on far superior hardware. It would be interesting to see how Indian buyers respond to first of its kind device with low on specs but high on user experience. Phones like Moto G, Mi 3 are far ahead in specs and comes for half the price.

Share your thoughts on device in comments section below.

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Top 4 Mobile OS ready to compete with Android and iOS

Before Apple's iPhone people merely bothered about Operating system of their mobile phones. Customers just wanted to get phones with good features like camera, mp3 support, FM radio, torch light (Remember Nokia 1110 :-) ). iPhone changed the way people looked at their phones, now with features people looked for apps available, processor speed and lot more. In this time a new operating system Android was announced and soon it became the pioneer in smart phone market. It is giving tough competition to Apple's iOS and had almost(except some market segment) wiped out Nokia from the market. Samsung fully backed Google's Android and it became the most liked android OEM, but with Google's dominance over Android other alternatives are vital to eliminate monopoly. Here we have a look at 5 most eligible alternatives to Android.

1. Tizen: First one comes from the company which has made the most from Android. Yes, this operating system is a product of Samsung. It is believed that Samsung has dumped its Bada OS to pave way for development of Tizen. Recently Tizen was announced in Mobile World Congress. However the experts were not convinced from the devices running on Tizen there but that was a mere entry version, final product is yet to come. Tizen is jointly developed by Intel, Samsung, Sprint Nextel and some other companies.

2. Ubuntu Touch: Canonical the company behind one of the most popular versions of Linux i.e. Ubuntu announced its Mobile Operating System Ubuntu touch early Jan this year. Ubuntu touch is based on the Linux kernel as Android hence many of the handsets currently running Android will be compatible with Ubuntu touch too. According to Canonical , Ubuntu touch will work on Mobile as well  as PC equally efficient. There are already apps available on its store and developers are adding more to it. Personally I would love to have Ubuntu touch for my phone, eagerly waiting for it.

3. Firefox OS: Firefox, mostly famous for its Mozilla browser also launched two smartphones running its Firefox OS.  Firefox has started sending preview devices for the developers to make its app store more rich before commercially starting shipping of phones running on Firefox OS.

4. Jolla Sailfish: Finland based Jolla is working on Sailfish OS, if you see some videos on youtube you will find it really interesting, specially the interaction with apps on home screen is amazing. Home screen , however resembles with Windows OS full of live tiles. Chinese largest mobile retailer in country D.phone is backing Jolla in this project.

It is difficult to say whether any of the above will be as successful as Android, but to start in market they have to compete not only with Android and iOS , there is Windows, Blackberry OS, Nokia all these are heavy hand and capable of playing market tactics. One more challenge will be to provide quality apps to users they have to build app store to compete with Google's Play or Apple store.
More competition , more flavours, more variety - it will be treat for end users

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