Jolla

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This article is about the company. For the smartphone, see Jolla (mobile phone). For the smartphone for Developers and Community, see Jolla C. For the tablet, see Jolla Tablet. For other uses, see Jolla (disambiguation).
Jolla Oy
Osakeyhtiö
(Limited company)
Industry Mobile devices, Consumer Electronics/Devices
Predecessor MeeGo team from Nokia
Founded Pirkkala, Finland (March 29, 2011 (2011-03-29))
Founder
  • Sami Pienimäki
  • Jussi Hurmola
  • Marc Dillon
  • Stefano Mosconi
  • Antti Saarnio
Headquarters Helsinki, Finland
Area served
 Worldwide
Key people
Products Smartphones with Linux-based Sailfish OS continuing the previous work of the MeeGo project
Number of employees
 150 developers
Website jolla.com, blog.jolla.com

Jolla Oy[1] (sometimes referred to as Jolla Ltd.) is a Finnish technology company; a vendor of mobile devices[2] and the developer of Sailfish OS.[3] Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Jolla has research and development (R&D) offices in Helsinki and Tampere and also an R&D department and office in Cyberport, Hong Kong. They are also reported to be establishing R&D and operations in China. Jolla was founded in 2011 by former Nokia staff.

Jolla, in Finnish, is pronounced 'yolla'.The company name means dinghy (a small agile boat) in Finnish. It can also be recognized as an ironic joke about the "burning platform memo" which contained the suggestion to "jump into the cold sea water" or "burn with platform" considering the Nokia business, based on a memo supposedly leaked by former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in February 2011.[4]

History

Former logo

In 2005, Nokia created a new Linux operating system called OS2005, which shipped with the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It was renamed Maemo (version 5) and shipped with the Nokia N900 in 2009. Nokia then merged Maemo with Intel's Moblin project (also an open source Linux OS), and it resulted in a new project called MeeGo in 2010. Nokia announced that year that the N8 would be the last flagship Nseries phone to run Symbian, and that MeeGo would replace it in the future, resulting in high anticipation.[5]

But in 2011, now under new CEO Stephen Elop, the company announced a partnership with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7 as its primary operating system to replace its Symbian platform, a decision that was criticised by many. The MeeGo project was declared as having no future except for one device to be released, the Nokia N9, which was announced in June 2011. The N9 received mass praise and positive reactions, but Elop said the company will not go back to the MeeGo project, and focus only for the future Windows Phone Lumia line.

The N9's positive reception coupled with the CEO's reluctance to continue the project resulted in significant unsatisfactory from the MeeGo team and other Nokia employees. As a result, in October 2011, some of the MeeGo team left Nokia to form Jolla, a new entity created to continue the MeeGo project. They utilised funding from Nokia's "Bridge" program which helps establish and support start-up companies formed by ex-Nokia employees.[6][7][8]

Nokia paid employees leaving the company €25,000, but had not given any rights to patents or other intellectual property to Jolla. While Jolla's Sailfish OS can be considered a direct successor to Nokia and Intel's MeeGo and the N9, only its software is based on the open-sourced components of MeeGo, while the closed-source user interface design for all future devices had to be developed from scratch.

Jolla went public on 6 July 2012, announcing its intention to develop new smartphones which utilized a gesture-oriented user interface. They named their operating system "Sailfish", which is a result of Mer and includes a gesture-based user interface developed using the Qt, QML and HTML5, as did Nokia's N9.

Jolla co-operate with others to grow their application's and MeeGo ecosystem.[9] Jolla announced on 17 September 2013 that their phone will be capable of running most Android applications, though without direct access to the Google Play Store.[10]

On 7 July 2015, Jolla announced that it would spin out its hardware operations to a brand new company established for this purposes and will continue to focus on current activities as a developer and licensor of the Sailfish OS.[11]

In November 2015, Jolla had to lay off half of its employees due to financial problems. On December 21, 2015, Jolla announced that they would be "shipping an additional small batch of the Jolla Tablet to early backers during early 2016" but "all of our backers will not get a Jolla Tablet".[12]

Products

Hardware

Marc Dillon showing the Jolla's phone. The event was titled Jolla Love Day at KlausK, Helsinki.[13]
People waiting to get hands on with Jolla's phone.
Jolla's mobile phone
  • Jolla Mobile Phone - smartphone with 4.5 in IPS qHD display, 16 GB storage, 1 GB RAM, a microSD slot and an 8 MP camera.
  • Jolla Tablet - Sailfish OS 2.0 64-bit Intel's CPU tablet with 7.85 in IPS display, 32GB storage, 2GB RAM, Micro SD slot, 5MP main and 2MP front camera
  • The Other Half - replaceable back cover to the Jolla phone, which can be used as hardware extension for various purposes. It has NFC and power connection to main smartphone, can have own RAM, CPU, software or hardware, can influence on smartphone performance as easy replaceable accessory or extension. E.g. used to change appearance and ambience settings, or connect the hardware keyboard.
  • Jolla C Mobile Phone - smartphone with 5.0 in IPS HD display, 16 GB storage, 2 GB RAM, a microSD slot and an 8 MP camera.[14]

Ecosystem

One of elements of the ecosystem is the Harbour.Jolla.com site, which is devoted for submitting, managing and selling applications at the Jolla Store. Consumers can install available software directly on their Sailfish devices.

Software can be submitted on a free or commercial basis, utilizing either the Sailfish OS or Android OS applications.

Currently, the Jolla Harbour and Jolla Store support only free applications. The subsystem for payments is under active development to avoid problems with monetizing software.

For developers and software enthusiasts, sailfishos.org collects and publishes here[15] an online compendium of knowledge, links and instructions on:[16]

  • software porting and migration to Sailfish OS;
  • similarities and differences between Harmattan and Sailfish;
  • guides on how to port MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan applications for both the Nokia N9 and the Sailfish operating system;
  • porting framework;
  • application porting tutorials and examples (QtQuick QML applications, the Flickr Qt 5, SDL / OpenGL ES applications);
  • Qt Quick Components map to Sailfish Silica.

Software

Sailfish OS is able to run:

  • Sailfish-native apps;
  • Android apps using built in Sailfish OS compatibility layer the Alien Dalvik from Myriad Group;
  • MeeGo-native apps if its user's interface is usable under Sailfish interface;
  • in general all Linux apps compiled for Sailfish device or binaries with RPM storage standard, also in console mode or as a non-graphic terminal.

All Android software available from the Jolla "harbour" store were tested with a real Jolla device. Android or MeeGo or Linux software can be downloaded from any 3rd party e.g. Google store or any other source, due to Sailfish OS openness policy. From launch, this has given the devices access to a large number of applications, which was estimated above 0.5M unique software pieces at the time of the device launch.

Because Sailfish is Linux and use Qt and Sailfish SDK is in Qt, it is possible to port applications without significant effort, including the following sources:

  • Qt (ported from other Qt-supported operating systems such as Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo, Windows and other projects with Qt source code)
  • MeeGo (because Sailfish has inherited much of the MeeGo work using the MER core)
  • Unix and Linux (usually command-line applications or other UI limitations are possible, RPM makes downloading easier)
  • HTML5 (using the installed Mozilla-based browser or directly the OS implementation of HTML5)
  • Android (either porting to be a Sailfish-native app or with corrections needed for UI)

For easy porting and development the Sailfish SDK emulates the whole device, the OS and its behaviour using isolated virtual machine on host computer e.g. Windows or Mac or Linux. As it is fully emulated, not simulated, and Jolla strongly declares it is possible to test behaviour like with real device when using Jolla SDK developer's environment. So it is possible to develop and test software without using a Jolla device.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ http://www.cnet.com/news/nokia-picks-meego-over-symbian-for-iphone-rival/
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ https://jolla.com/jollac
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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