Now, it is my pleasure to share you really good news: we’re back from the death valley! We have just finished our latest financing round and secured solid new financing to the company. This investment enables the continuation of Sailfish OS development, the community activities and other company operations. It’s clear that this recent struggle hit us hard and left some battle wounds but most importantly this means that the development and life of Sailfish OS will continue strong. This alone is worth a celebration!
Whether this is just a stay or an actual solution remains to be seen, but I’m skeptical.
http://world.taobao.com/item/525258878357.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0…
Company that manufactured those tablets, is now selling them with android…
And Jolla are OK with it?
The manufacturer may not have been able to get their payments from Jolla for making the tablets. It is a cost recovery exercise.
Edited 2015-12-20 03:53 UTC
I hope they aren’t using Jolla’s tablets and just make more of the same ones. Otherwise backers won’t see them for a very long time still.
CEO of jolla mr. Aarnio: ^aEUR yes, nothing to do with Jolla, but it seems that our production partner from China started selling some tables which were already produced and in their stock. We are discussing with them that they would stop sales immeadiately^aEUR
http://merproject.org/logs/%23mer-meeting/%23mer-meeting.20…
Too little too late. The manufacturer has already offloaded them onto a reseller. There’s even a chance the tablets passed through a liquidation-type middleman first.
Based on the photo of cardboard boxes, shown government surplus auction style, there are 21 cases of tablets at the retailer. Each case contains how many tablets, 50-100? So there are 1000-2000 tablets that were manufactured. Is that about the number expected in the next “wave” from Jolla?
$180USD seems like full price. When they’re on closeout for $80 with free shipping I’ll consider picking one up.
If anyone is still following this, here are the Jolla tablets at the English front-end website for Taobao.
http://www.engtaobao.com/item/525246736574.html
$191, with a listed inventory of 1,000 available. Meanwhile, the price at the Chinese-language site has dropped to ‘only’ $151.
The law is pretty clear. If you don’t get paid for goods you can sell them to recover costs. Jolla can’t stop them.
I wonder how the anxious Jolla “prepaid tablet” customers are taking that news?
The product screenshots, don’t they all look like Sailfish? I doubt the manufacturer opened every tablet in every box and installed a new OS on the Jolla tablets…
I was thinking the same. Listings on Taobao are not always known for accuracy, I think ^aEUR“ I remember seeing something unconvincing/blatantly wrong there before the release of the Priv by BlackBerry…
Most likely it is not a long term solution for Jolla’s finances, but I hope they will survive at least long enough to make another phone. After a year with SailfishOS I would definitely not want to go back to Android…
After a month with Ubuntu Touch I would definitely not want to go back to SailfishOS..
They are out of the hardware business and only focussing on the software. So they will surely not make another phone
They are now making it sound like they are only a softwarecompany, but they already stated that software is incredibly hard for them. (Hardware is easy, software is a beast, yet they don’t even have a plan for delivering the hardware yet)
They also mentioned that they had several waves ready to ship and that there was no money problem for the hardware. Now they say “with the new financing we can now start shipping again or refunding”
Mind you, this is now 1 year old hardware that was already more expensive than the comparable Nokia at launch and they got it all prepaid.
Also, why do they think they can earn money from their OS? The main reason seems to be that “Jolla is the only player in the market that can provide ^aEURoea licensable, secure, private operating system^aEUR”
That private is a HUGE red herring because it has nothing to do with privacy of the end user. That private has to do with governements and companies being able to modify the OS
Jolla has the reputation of being crowdsources/funded and “loved by enthousiasts” while in reality they have only ever shipped one phone ages ago, have no intention of making another, and all their tablet backers are still out in the cold. On the software side Jolla is simply “selling out”
I love the idealism of the initial videos of Jolla, but that simply hasn’t worked out and they are now in full-on “whatever it takes to survive” mode…which means their customers are going to get screwed