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posted by LaminatorX on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the Jolla-back dept.

Life seems pretty good right now for Jolla, the Finnish mobile device maker formed in 2011 by former Nokia employees. Their tablet crowdfunding goal of $380k was reached hours after the Indiegogo campaign started. Currently they've raised just over $1.3m, prompting Jolla to add new funding targets this week:

The price is also competitive, with Indiegogo backers being charged $209 for the device and Jolla anticipating the final retail price of the device will be $249...if total funding reaches $2.5m, Jolla will begin offering HSDPA connectivity as an add-on for $30.

In answering the question to whether the market needs another tablet, Jolla CEO Marc Dillon responded:

"The great thing with this tablet we are launching is that not only is it state of the art in software, it can also be state of the art in specifications and at a very competitive price. Now we are really able to compete with the big companies on what they have traditionally dominated - the supply chain..."

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Jolla Crowdfunded Tablet Meets Goal in a Few Hours 44 comments

Finnish software maker Jolla, founded by laid-off Nokia employees, has revealed a crowd sourcing campaign for a tablet computer. The Indiegogo campaign had a goal of $380,000 which was reached within a few hours, prompting Jolla to add more devices (at a slightly higher price).

The tablet will be running the as-of-yet unreleased Sailfish OS 2, and have technical specifications rivaling the iPad Mini 3 and the Google Nexus 9, but at about half the price.

Estimated delivery is in May 2015. The campaign goal of $380,000 was reached in just a couple of hours and the campaign will run for 21 more days.

Some hardware specifications:
1.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel
2 GB RAM
32GB EMMC ROM + SD slot
7.85" 2048x1536 IPS display (330 ppi, rivaling iPad Mini 3)
WiFi only
4300 mAh battery, considerably smaller capacity than competitors

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:37AM (#121070)

    $249? You can get a full real Windows OS Tablet for $99 now. I think they are a little late. But hey, since people are throwing money at them for some stupid reason they they'd be fools to not take it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:41AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:41AM (#121071)

      Here is the Tablet I was talking about.

      HP Stream 7 Signature Edition = $99
      http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/HP-Stream-7-Signature-Edition-Tablet/productID.308781500 [microsoftstore.com]

      • (Score: 2) by moondrake on Sunday November 30 2014, @12:41PM

        by moondrake (2658) on Sunday November 30 2014, @12:41PM (#121260)

        Did you even bother to compare the hardware?

        that HP thing has an inferior processor, a lower display quality, the camera is worse, and it has less memory.

        If I am going to buy a crap tablet than I probably can even do better than this $99 windows toy....

    • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:30PM

      by CRCulver (4390) on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:30PM (#121079) Homepage
      If you think that a Windows tablet is a better deal than this Jolla one, you may not understand Jolla's software stack and why a niche of users wants it.
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:36PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:36PM (#121081) Journal

      Is that a tablet where the CPU isn't code signed and will demand your boot code to be signed as well? with secret interface to the hardware?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:11PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:11PM (#121152)

        I don't think so. AFAIK "secure boot" is only on non-x86 windows tablets/phones.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:57PM (#121083)

      The real question is why you would want a Windows tablet at all? I would have no use for one. Some of us want a UI which gives you real power and flexibility, not some dumbed-down kiosk interface.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:07PM (#121101)

        And some of us want a selection of software that we can actually use.

        • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday November 30 2014, @06:48AM

          by davester666 (155) on Sunday November 30 2014, @06:48AM (#121223)

          And you totally will want to use that vast selection of software on a $99 tablet.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 30 2014, @11:59AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 30 2014, @11:59AM (#121255)

            Exactly, I do. I'm glad you understand.

            • (Score: 2) by moondrake on Sunday November 30 2014, @12:33PM

              by moondrake (2658) on Sunday November 30 2014, @12:33PM (#121259)

              After which you will realize that must of that software does not work well/convenient on a tablet at all. Nor is there space to install all of it.

              Software compatibility on a tablet is a fake argument.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:40PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:40PM (#121082) Journal

    Will the software interfaces in this device be open and published? Such that one can install free operating system of choice? Or will the CPU have code signing turned on and demand boot code signed by Jolla Inc?

    • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:58PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:58PM (#121084)

      I don't know but I imagine so...

      Thing is, this ia a non-windoze, non-android tablet that can run android-apps, running linux.

      Best of all worlds?

      • (Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:12PM

        by cmn32480 (443) <reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {08423nmc}> on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:12PM (#121087) Journal

        What flavor of Linux? And will it use systemd?

        --
        "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:31PM

          by kaszz (4211) on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:31PM (#121091) Journal

          The BSD flavor? :P

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:10PM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:10PM (#121103) Journal

          What flavor of Linux?

          The hotdog-with-Finnish-mustard [wikipedia.org] one - aka SailFishOS [sailfishos.org] - get the SDK-es and you are ready to go.
          Native GUI is Qt [wikipedia.org]

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 1) by Gravis on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:02PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:02PM (#121098)

    just a heads up for those who might be interested, it uses an x86_64 CPU. if you should know anything about CPUs, know that x86 (64 bit or not) architecture is a power hungry monster and will eat your battery with a smile.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @02:11PM (#121105)

      You are either a liar or unaware of the last few gens of intel mobile chips.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:54PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:54PM (#121128) Journal

        If it's x86 compatible it's also inefficient..

        Now if it had the MC68000 instruction set one can at least give it the time of day. But the x86 instruction set makes it impossible to express coding in an efficient way. The same goes when the CPU needs to decode that mess.

        • (Score: 1) by forkazoo on Sunday November 30 2014, @10:10PM

          by forkazoo (2561) on Sunday November 30 2014, @10:10PM (#121336)

          Oh cool, I hadn't realised this tablet was coming to market in 1992. You know, in the era before increasing transistor budgets meant that ISA specific instruction decode units made up a nontrivial percent of core area, and core area was the overwhelming majority of a processor die. Boy, I am gonna be the coolest kid in school.

          Seriously, I am no fan of x86, but Intel is a generation ahead of the world on process technology. They've been dumping massive R+D budgets into making efficient chips that smaller competitors can't really compete with. They have a power-optimised design in teh form of Atom which is a very different implementation of x86 from the server/desktop chips. And, even the big power hungry server chips tend to dominate or at least compete with ARM very well in terms of FLOPS/Watt.

          Some of that ugliness of x86 architecture actually means it's possible to "express coding" in an extremely efficient way. Compared to a "beautiful" architecture like MIPS or whatever, x86 binaries are practically compressed, which means that less memory bandwidth is used on instruction stream fetch. For example, x86 can use one instruction to load a 32 bit immediate, but MIPS requires 2 since instruction words are exactly 32 bits, which doesn't leave enough room for opcode + 32 bits of data. 68k would be just as ugly as x86 if it were still being grown as a high performance ISA today. It's straight up classic CISC, so it doesn't even have the beauty argument of some of the RISC alternatives.

          I'd be perfectly happy to see Intel whither, and real ISA competition come back to computing. But wishing a thing doesn't make it so...

          • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday November 30 2014, @11:02PM

            by kaszz (4211) on Sunday November 30 2014, @11:02PM (#121345) Journal

            Any real ISA competition isn't likely to happen because in the beginning there were lot's of CPU architectures but little software in comparison to the current situation with a lot of software and few CPU architectures that is very capital intensive to make.

            Intel is good at making the CPUs physically but the x86 ISA is an abhorrent creation.

      • (Score: 2) by meisterister on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:15PM

        by meisterister (949) on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:15PM (#121176) Journal

        I have a completely tangential complaint: These are Intel chips.

        I refuse to give that company my money. There are many reasons for this, the first of which is that they are greedy monopolistic bastards, the second is that x86 is an architecture that should've been dead by the early '90s, and the third is that I genuinely like ARM. ARM Holdings makes some very nice designs that are becoming increasingly interesting to look at from an architectural standpoint.

        --
        (May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday November 30 2014, @02:16AM

          by frojack (1554) on Sunday November 30 2014, @02:16AM (#121199) Journal

          I refuse to give that company my money.

          So what? We should all follow your lead? You think ARM is any better? They don't even make anything, all they do is sell licenses. The hardware equivalent of a patent troll.

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:59PM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:59PM (#121129)

    These are exciting developments for anyone following the third way in mobile os development. It's a complicated family tree but Sailfish traces its roots to a much more open implementation of Linux than Android.
    You may (or may not) remember the Zaurus, then Angstrom, the N900, then Meego, then the dark years.
    The developers that kept the torch burning despite the collapse of Nokia should be applauded.
    Let's hope we finally see the emergence of a hackers' mobile os.