The first handset from Finnish smartphone startup Jolla is simply called Jolla. This phone has been some two years in the making - a timeframe that testifies to the complexity of building handset hardware and a new mobile platform, not to mention rallying developers and achieving Android compatibility. So really two years ain't bad for a plucky startup whose members used to work for erstwhile king-of-the-mobile-world, Nokia, and left to do what that phone maker decided it couldn't: make a go of MeeGo as an alternative to Google's all-consuming Android.
What was MeeGo on Nokia's N9 is now Sailfish on Jolla's eponymous handset. The Jolla phone finally launched on Wednesday, in Helsinki, with the first 450 devices taken home mainly by those who had already registered their interest via a pre-sales campaign. Jolla is now shipping handsets to other pre-orderers throughout Europe. The top three countries for pre-sales were, in order of popularity, Finland (as you'd expect), Germany and the U.K.
The Jolla phone hardware reforms the standard smartphone slab into an attractive plastic sandwich, as if two blocks of different coloured liquorice have been smacked together. The back piece - which was plain white on the above demo device but comes in bright pink for Finnish carrier DNA's first batch of the phones, and in customisable colours in future when Jolla starts direct sales via its own website - is known as The Other Half.
Like Jolla's software The Other Half is intended as an extensible platform - with connectors built into the back of the phone for power and a bus connection for data transfer allowing for Other Halves that could incorporate a physical Qwerty keyboard, for instance, or a weather station sensor or even an e-ink screen, as well as the NFC-powered software theme-swapping supported by the current crop of shells.
“Putting something like a keyboard is expected,” said Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon. “We are working on the developers kit so that anybody can do this… We're working on accessories, and we expect third parties to work on accessories.”
The standard Jolla handset (i.e. with a not-too-fancy Other Half) is a nice size and weight in the hand - neither too big to be overbearing, nor too hefty or lightweight to feel unpleasant to hold. On paper, its specs come across as relatively mid-range - with a 4.5″ display, a dual-core chip, 4G, an 8MP camera plus 16GB of internal memory expandable via microSD card. But differentiating on phone hardware specs is not what Jolla is all about.
Source : TechCrunch
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