Submitted by Stefan Constantinescu interviews the CEO of JollaMobile, the company that will continue the work that Nokia started with Maemo/MeeGo before ditching it for Windows Phone. This answer indicates just how far these guys already are: “In order to make a smartphone these days you need chipset vendor support, ODM support, and some other companies too. We’re currently in the negotiations phase, and we’re really close to being able to communicate what partners we actually use. This is our present situation.”
Mollah Mobile, national telco in Afghanistan, with Mollah Omar CEO
Jussi was one of my best friends in elementary school and in high schoool too. He was a great person and a very talented guy, who got the best grades with minimum effort. That and the ambitious plans make Jolla something, worth following carefully.
Hm, this mini-story of your (and his) youth seems to strongly imply that, at your place, the peers don’t make the life of top students into hell…
Oh well, I guess it’s a Nordic thing / must have been fun to grow up.
The most interesting point for me is the commoditization of hardware manufacturing. I though we would have to wait for 3D printing to improve thousand-fold until we could see this (a dream very far away), but now it seems that a small team can already get manufacturing power through OEM. Barriers have been lowered.
There are now start-up programs like http://www.haxlr8r.com/ (one project out of this program is Nomiku : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nomiku/nomiku-bring-sous-vide-i… ). And OEMs accept now to work with small unknow teams and to produce smaller batches on-demand.
That means we are moving fast to an era where some people may be able to design and actually produce a full computer or smartphone to one’s liking (maybe one day with full open-source hardware specs and drivers… It will fast become a necessity if smartphone manufacturers keep locking their devices and Microsoft continues pushing for BIOS-level lockdown on x86).
See also Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, KDE’s Vivaldi (ex-Spark) tablet, ColorHug… This is a trend I hope will grow.
Edited 2012-07-12 08:54 UTC
Yes that is true, to an extent. They only need 10 million Euros to do the manufacturing run. Which is really cheap, compared to what it would take to build a factory. On the other hand its still 10 million Euros.