Jolla Ltd, the mobile company from Finland today announced that its latest financing round which aimed to end in November, has been postponed and the company needs to adjust its operations accordingly. At the same time the company has filed for a debt restructuring program in Finland, to ensure the continuity of its business. Jolla will also temporarily lay off a big part of its personnel.
To anyone capable of basic pattern recognition, this does not come as a surprise. I doubt I’m getting my tablet, even though I backed it in the first hour of availability, but to be honest, I’m much more concerned about the people being “temporarily” laid off. These are all people who took an incredible risk to follow a dream, and I hope – despite the dire signs – Jolla pulls through and they can keep their jobs, or that they can easily and quickly find new jobs.
Almost two years ago, I wrote in my Jolla review:
Few devices have a history as complicated as the Jolla and Sailfish. The ten-year journey from the Nokia N770 to the Jolla was long, arduous, filled with focus shifts, mergers, and other complications. Like the nameless protagonist in The Last Resort, in order to step out of the shadows of the old world, Jolla had to leave Providence behind, traverse the Great Divide, cross the Rockies to reach the Malibu, and set sail across the Pacific to end up on the pearly white beaches of Lahaina.
However, also just like the nameless protagonist, they found that the natural beauty of Lahaina had already been framed and plasticised by hotel chains and fast food restaurants. It is in that environment that Jolla must make a stand and survive – because there’s no more new frontier.
It seems like Jolla was unable to survive amidst the hotel chains and fast food restaurants of the mobile technology industry.
Only a few days ago, my brother had a gift for me. Something special, something I know he cares about a lot. A square black box, embossed with the outline of a phone with a slide-out keyboard, and, in silver lettering, the timeless “NOKIA Nseries” and “Nokia N900”. None of you know my brother – obviously – but I know just how huge of a moment this was. Up until only a few months ago, he still used his Nokia N900 as his one and only smartphone. Not as a curiosity for parlour tricks – no, as his primary, day-to-day smartphone.
His attachment and love for his N900 is something you don’t see very often in technology. It’s not the kind of deluded fandom you see in some other circles, but more of a “I know this device is outdated and slow and that the software isn’t very modern, but it works for me“. Talk to any current N900 user, and you’ll get the same vibe. In fact, the N900 my brother gave to me wasn’t his only one, he still has another one as back-up.
As a back-up to what? Well, after a short stint with a Nokia N9 – which I bought from him a few years ago – he went back to his N900, until a few months ago, when he finally settled on a new device, a Sony Z3 Compact. After the last few months, he finally felt comfortable enough to donate one of his N900s (but not both!). Unsurprisingly, he was always interested in Jolla and kept an eye on them, and while he certainly played with mine on occasion, it never clicked.
When, as Jolla, spiritual successor to the infamous and beloved Nokia Maemo/Harmattan family, you can’t even entice someone like my brother, you know you’re lost in a world where you’re never going to compete with Android or iOS.
My limited edition Jolla The First One will always have a special place in my heart, and the tablet, if it ever ships to me, will certainly be one of the more prized curiosities in my collection, but I’m afraid the ship has sailed on Jolla.
It’s probably in Fiji by now.
I pre-ordered (or “donated”) to their tablet initiative almost a year ago, and still haven’t even received the invite to order the tablet, which was supposed to come out in the summer. I was the optimist who also ordered their phone when it first came out, despite it not having anything above 2G in the states.
I also doubt I will ever get the tablet, or a refund. I haven’t even received the link to place my “order” yet. Good riddance. This is not how you treat your customers. Failed projects like this, especially with the tremendous momentum that Jolla had behind them, have taught me to never pre-order again from an “upstart” company, and especially to avoid things like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
I did actually get to do the second order thing, but despite the thing, I still haven’t gotten the thing.
Cool, that’s farther than I ever got. Just tweeted at them, maybe I’ll get a response.
https://twitter.com/kiserjd/status/667726534623551488
Just keep doing what you were doing with Mameo. It worked great! It was simple, functional, revolutionary. Meego with qt everywhere sounded good, was never completed, then they started over with Sailfish and Jolla. And of course the other half, and the tablet. So much software changes for all of that. So unnecessary.
Their tombstone should be half carved out of marble with another unfinished half granite with words carved out on the front with a few on the back and some more outlines of where additional words would go.
Half of the reason they had to restart every time was because as the companies went under/bought/disbanded the source code also went down along them. There’s been no fully open source Maemo derivative ever since … Maemo.
Jolla also failed to make it open source, and now, well, it may be too late.
The other reasons are because they wanted to be closer in style to an iOS/Android device with each release, in many areas: ease of development, software provisioning methods, interface & usage patterns, etc. Whether those were misguided or not I’ll reserve my judgement.
Edited 2015-11-20 16:25 UTC
Why is it too late to open source Sailfish now? Even if they go under, they can keep Sailfish alive by opening it.
If that won’t happen – I’ll switch to Plasma Mobile altogether. I’m somewhat tried of waiting forever and want a proper FOSS operating system on my mobile handset.
Edited 2015-11-20 17:28 UTC
Yeah, Plasma Mobile *sounds* good. You must realize in your heart of hearts that the odds are stacked against them. It most likely will end up being Vivaldi 2.0.
Not really. It will be developed gradually, and KDE designers are doing a good job on the desktop, so why can’t they do a good job on mobile? Vivaldi wasn’t a failure of the software, it was a failure of particular project to release hardware.
Mobile is more difficult, due to the differences in hardware. Even if they try sticking with Nexus devices, its still tough to keep up. Their reference hardware ( nexus 5) is already two years old, and isn’t sold commercially anymore.
Those are bad, invalid reasons. It was supposed to be an open source system. Drop the proprietary bits and redo those, rather from starting from scratch.
Heck, look at what MariaDB did. Monty invents Mysql, open sources Mysql, years later its sold to Sun, then Oracle, Monty forks Mysql starts again. He didn’t start writing a completely different database to keep up with CouchDB or Mongo.
I also already bought and paid for a tablet. Sad.
When someone makes a computer with an attached physical keyboard, runs a complete Linux distribution seamlessly integrated with phone functionality, and fits in my pocket, then it will be a true successor to the Nokia N900.
Maybe something like the OpenPandora but able to do phone calls and texts.
I’ve tried to move on, but even after a year of getting by fine with a Jolla mobile… God, I still miss my N900 so much.
You can install Sailfish on Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro and it’s one of the better supported scenarios: https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris
It’s inexpensive, neat, has a keyboard and its specs are better than N900. See http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_pro-3779.php
Edited 2015-11-20 17:35 UTC
Funny that you mention it, as I’m using as my primary phone an Xperia Pro with that sailfish port.
It is surprisingly usable despite the handset having only 512MB of RAM.
If you want to try it, one caveat: the last release of the port (alpha3) breaks the keyboard layout. If you depend on the keyboard, better wait some days to give time to have it fixed.
That said, the keyboard worked great with the alpha1 release, which is the one I was using until a few days ago. OTOH, alpha3 is very smooth and almost everything seems to work (that is, AFAICT everything works apart from the mentioned keyboard layout and video recording).
Nexus 5 is the other port that is almost complete.
The status of the current ports is in the following page:
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris
If you have problems installing the ROM, there are very helpful people at ^aEUR<#sailfishos-porters IRC channel on Freenode.
I’m using it on Nexus 5.
How is the Nexus 4 port? I still keep meaning to install it to give it a try. Did they get Android Apps running yet?
I’m currently using Sailfish on Nexus 5, and it’s already quite good, even if rough at the edges because it’s a community port.
And I’m still waiting for my tablet, but I hope they’ll fully open source Sailfish before something drastic will happen (like Jolla shutting down or anything like that). It would be the only way to ensure that such huge effort wasn’t lost in vain.
And I really wish them luck – they should succeed. We need something new and refreshing in the sea of mass market mediocrity.
Edited 2015-11-20 17:23 UTC
Even after owning a pre3, ~A n9, jolla and a PlayBook, my old n900 is still missing me. It was a truly computer in your pocket, not all about that’s “app” thing. Want Facebook? Just go to the Web, and use your stillus. Want music in your pocket? Just load the 32gb, and even micro sd with flac, not that itune joke. Spreadsheet and so on? No problem. Games? Yes, quake \o/
Edited 2015-11-20 18:06 UTC
I’m still kicking myself for selling my last one, even though I made a hefty profit overall. It was glitchy, unlike my first one (FM radio never worked properly, and a kernel panic here and there) but by God it was an actual full fledged pocket computer! I used mostly command line apps on it to avoid the GUI lag, and even though I’ve used better mobile keyboards, it was perfectly suited to a portable Linux box.
Maybe I’ll ask the wife for a Neo900 for Christmas next year, and kick this (actually fairly decent) iPhone to the curb.
If Jolla went totally bankrupt, then I’d say you will not get your tablet.
Since they took the debt restructuring route, there is a good chance they will get shipped.
They started shipping them, so they are just sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting…
So I am supposed to feel sorry for Jolla… Well I am not. Why? Because it’s yet another company operating under the “mine mine mine API should dominate” mentality.
The market has decided on a standard: Android apps. The source for the API is there, so any OS should make sure it offers at least API compatibility, so porting is made easy for devs. So the only thing that needs to be changed is the cloud services and the Store.
But noo… let’s build our own little-known API and pretend we have our own ecosystem.
The nerd fantasy where we have a several different APIs and developers have to support them all is a nightmare for the ones who actually make the apps.
Edited 2015-11-21 02:48 UTC
I find this hilarious, pretty sure the API you’re referring to that Jolla uses is one of many that is and has been available for a very long time, Qt. I think the problem is really C++/QML vs Java, and any nob can sort of code in java, which is why we have such horrendous apps.
Two things:
Jolla phones and tablets can run (most) android apps, so there’s your precious API compatibility with android. No porting necessary. Just shove your fart app into supported app stores (no playstore support without nerd magic).
The nerd fantasy Jolla has been providing is the promise of NOT having to write apps using horrible android API.
People should just move on to Ubuntu Touch. It’s sad that hardcore Linux geeks hate Canonical so much. They have done a great job with Ubuntu touch. I own a Jolla and the first Bq Ubuntu phone. Ubuntu’s UI reminds me of Nokia N9 and I like that. I always hated Jolla’s gestures.
Edited 2015-11-22 14:38 UTC
Canoncial made several poor decisions which caused a lot of people to be alienated. Their undeserved derision of Wayland and Mir NIH diversion is a major example. And that’s their approach in general. Do what they want, and try to calm down the community outrage later. That doesn’t work really to gain respect.
So I’m personally not interested in Ubuntu Touch. But I’m keeping track of Sailfish (if it will become FOSS) and Plasma Mobile.
Edited 2015-11-22 18:00 UTC
By that logic there should be only one web browser.
By that logic, there shouldn’t be any focused effort. And that’s wrong when resources are limited. Plus their general arrogance and ignoring needs of the community caused many to simply avoid them.
So what is your opinion on ditching their in-house Upstart and switching to systemd together with Debian?
That’s a good thing, and I kind of still hope they’ll ditch Mir and will switch to Wayland as well to avoid this unnecessary split and burden they put on GUI toolkits and drivers developers.
Edited 2015-11-23 00:08 UTC
I really want to like ubuntu touch, but the draconian iphone style forced app lifecycle with absolutely no multitasking ability whatsoever allowed just feels unnecessarily limiting and wrong. This makes the included terminal app mostly unusable, you can’t for instance ssh to a server and switch to the browser to google for help on something, that will kill the connection.
There are lots of user interface decisions I’m not very fond of either but I could live with that. For instance I don’t get the point of the so called ‘multitasking view’ that leaves behind a screenshot of every app ever opened in a carousel view, which soon gets so crowded it is completely unusable until you start cleaning it up. I hate needing to clean up, but I suppose I could just ignore it since it’s just one of three different ways to open an app.
The ‘scope’ thing also suffers badly from the carousel view used to switch scopes, the three main ‘carousel’ views of the nokia N9 was still usable in my opinion but many people complained that three was too much to swipe thorough. Canonical promotes scopes as a replacement for apps and puts them all in the same carousel, apparently expecting us to swipe through tens of scopes trying to find the correct one, while every scope swiped into view wakes up and starts to slowly refresh it’s content over the mobile connection. Slow and awkward. I’m sure that they will redesign that after a while, possibly ditching the idea completely.
I’m still hoping that the convergence story when realized will allow real multitasking on the phone, but they are completely silent on that, instead prefering to pretend they already do ‘multitasking’. But who knows it could very well go the other way with no multitasking even on a desktop…
Edited 2015-11-23 08:35 UTC
Yeah, I could see this coming for a while now, but I always had a hope in the back of my mind that they’d surprise everyone and come out with the Jolla Phone 2 and be able to get enough of a foothold to survive… I still hope that happens, but I think it’s too late now. Sad times! I’ve no idea what my next phone will be now when my trusty N9 finally bites the dust.
Just in case someone missed this:
https://blog.jolla.com/open-letter-jolla-community/