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posted by martyb on Friday April 24 2015, @11:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-fast-cheap-pick-two dept.

According to the Jolla Blog the ship date for the much anticipated Jolla Tablet has slipped: From June-ish to July-ish. (The original ship date was expected to be May).

Jolla had one of the most successful Crowdfunded projects run by IndieGOGO. It ended up being over funded by 480%, exhibiting strong support for another tablet that isn't IOS, isn't Android, and isn't Windows.

Pre-production versions of the Jolla Tablet were judged Best Tablet of Mobile World Congress 15. (autoplay video on the page).

In fact the MWC event played a part in slowing down the release, as Jolla burned the midnight oil getting demonstrators ready for the show. In spite of a not yet completed Sailfish 2.0 operating system and not yet finalized hardware, Jolla impressed all reviewers.

Along the way, Jolla made significant upgrades to to the tablet's specs, including an upgraded Sailfish 2.0. Also added were larger memory, and a just announced new screen.

Sailfish OS can run android apps. The latest release version is Sailfish Äijänpäivänjärvi. (No, I can't pronounce it either). Its currently running on the Jolla phone, available mostly in Europe.

Since Sailfish is based on Ubuntu and Mer, it is Linux, and as such you can install Linux applications. Because of this, it may provide some competition to the big players in the mobile field.

Jolla (pronounced "yala", means small boat in Finish) is based in Finland (Suomi). The company is composed of ex-Nokia veterans. The Tablet's Main Website is rather script heavy.

Disclaimer: While this may read like a slashvertisment, I have no connection to Jolla, other than as a future customer. I participated in the Crowd-funding, (paid the money) but I haven't seen either the Tablet or the Phone yet. I'm eager to get my hands on it. Delays aren't fun, but I'd rather have it right than have it right away.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by benmhall on Friday April 24 2015, @10:52PM

    by benmhall (5229) on Friday April 24 2015, @10:52PM (#174874) Homepage

    > Since Sailfish is based on Ubuntu and Mer, it is Linux, and as such you can install Linux applications.

    Jolla is NOT based on Ubuntu. It uses Sailfish OS which is based on Meego, which was an Intel/Nokia successor to Maemo, which ran Nokia's 770, N800, N810, and N900. It does use a Linux kernel (as does Android.) I haven't followed Sailfish OS, but know for a fact that Maemo used X11 (not Mir or Wayland, this was WAY before that) and at the time was based largely around Gnome software. (GTK, gstreamer.) I think newer versions shifted away from GTK in favour of QT. Nokia's plan, before moving to Windows Phone OS, was to move away from Symbian to Meego, which used QT, a technology Nokia bought from Trolltech. I'm pretty sure that Maemo predates Ubuntu, but it was based on Debian and was a striaght ARM port that used dpkg, .deb files, apt-get, etc. Not sure how much of that is still left.

    My understanding is that when Nokia jumped ship to Windows Phone and left everyone high and dry, that many of Maemo/Meego devs quit to start Jolla and continue their efforts as Sailfish OS. (More trivia: In addition to forming the basis of Sailfish OS, Meego was what Samsung's Tizen began life as.)

    Sailfish OS does indeed run Android apps, just like BlackBerry 10 does. From a UI perspective, Sailfish seems a lot like BlackBerry 10 (which bears more than a small resemblance to Palm's webOS which, like Sailfish, was also based on Linux.)

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