Jolla shows Sailfish 2.0 and partners with Intel

[Guest PaulOBrien]

This morning Jolla showed us their Jolla Tablet and the Sailfish 2.0 OS, alongside their announcement of a new partnership with Intel.

Jolla was established in 2011, spun out of Nokia in order to continue development of the Meego OS, into which Nokia had sunk 7 years of R&D and 1 billion Euros of investment. Today, the 128 employee company (which has raised $50M in funding) develops the OS, now renamed Sailfish, together with the Jolla phone and tablet and the Jolla launcher for Android.

Sailfish, particularly in it's 2.0 iteration demoed today, offers a very media-centric UI that, as well as supporting its own apps, can run a layer allowing Android apps to run on the platform. When used, Android apps run in a native fashion such that there is no performance degradation over a 'real' Android device. Even when the Android runtime is installed, the device is, of course, still 'Google free' (i.e. no Google services).

Jolla strategy is pretty straightforward - like many of their competitors, they are looking to licence their Operating System as the '3rd Mobile OS'. Why? Their pitch is that the main OS', even if originally open source, are developing into closed ecosystems, which doesn't benefit anybody except the owners of the OS themselves. Jolla want to provide an independent, neutral solution with increased emphasis on security and privacy.

Following on from the launch of the original Jolla phone, Sailfish OS 2.0 is now ready for licencing and to achieve this goal, the company has partnered with Intel, to offer a reference platform customers based on the Baytrail Atom chipset also seen in the Jolla tablet.

As part of the Intel initiative, Jolla is inviting regional Internet leaders to join a 'Sailfish alliance' to build local ecosystems - companies include Three, VK, Yandex, AliSPAM, Baidu, Snapdeal and more. The Jolla OS will appeal to these groups because it deeply integrates services, for example a demonstrated 'Snapdeal' device for India surfaces media content. The OS is licenced on a revenue share model for media, also offering premium apps for download from the Sailfish store.

The Open Source Jolla platform has an emphasis on security and the company is partnering with the renowned SSH Communications Security (yes, those SSH guys), and the two are jointly developing secure mobile phone and table solutions that are ideal for governments, corporations and privacy aware consumers. Apparently there is a lot of interest from governments already, which isn't really surprising given recent events. Jolla are also inviting other industry partners to join the initiative.

During the event the company talked more about the Jolla Tablet, the world's first crowdsourced tablet, which is currently fundraising on Indiegogo.

The tablet, running Sailfish OS of course, is powered by Open Source, with community input via together.jolla.com. Monthly updates are released on both on phones / tablets in developer and stable versions, appealing a lot to the hacker community - a traditional Android stronghold.

The device, powered by the aforementioned Intel CPU, is available in 32 and 64GB variants with 2GB RAM, a 4.75" 2048x1536 IPS screen, a 4450mAh battery in a 8.3mm thick 384g shell. We only had a brief time with the device but it looks interested by virtue of it's extremely gesture-based software. The tablet is priced from $249 USD, undercutting or matching all of it's competitors; the Nokia N1 starts at $249 and other similar tablets much more expensive.

The device is expected to ship from Q2 2015.

So, will Jolla go anywhere? It's hard to say. There may be an opportunity for another player, but it's a very crowded space with some big names. It seems possible that Jolla can appeal to enthusiasts turned off by the changes in Android, but making any sort of impact in the mass market is a whole different question. I wish them well.

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