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Jolla, of "where's my tablet" fame, has announced a plan the sell their SailfishOS for Sony Xperia X phones as an aftermartket upgrade. From the announcement:
Here are the hard facts you need to know:
Sales start date: September 27, 2017. Product – what you will get:
- Sailfish OS image to flash to your Xperia device – our target is to have the downloadable image ready by October 11
- Android support, predictive text input, and MS exchange support as downloads from Jolla Store to your device
- SW updates for one year, after which a continuation program will follow
- Clear instructions and support for downloads & installation
- Jolla Customer Care service
Availability: EU, Norway, Switzerland; US & CA to be confirmed. Price: 49,90€ (including VAT)
Seems like quite the bizarre move for a company that has lost so much consumer faith.
Seen on Phoronix
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Jolla to Sell OS Image for Sony Phone
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It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @12:21AM (1 child)
I donated money to an indiegogo campaign -- they're careful to make it very clear that that's a donation you hope to get a reward for, not a contract or purchase. That's exactly why I only throw money I can afford to lose into this kind of thing. While I'm obviously not happy with the outcome, I don't see that I have any legal or moral basis to demand a settlement. And while I'd definitely balk at giving them $300 for a new device (I find the comments on Jolla's blog post demanding that they should sell phones preloaded with Sailfish utterly hilarious!), $60 is not a big deal.
As for it being a "scam", or them belonging in jail, my perspective is that they tried to spend some of the crowdfund money getting their OS ready to sell/license to phone manufacturers, while honestly trying to keep enough back to get the tablets through -- and as I see it, they're not wrong to do that, as long as they really do keep enough back to do the tablets. But things went wrong with tablet project, and they hadn't reserved enough margin to deal with the problems. It's definitely a bad outcome, but, how can I tell whether their error was in estimating the risk of various cost overruns to get the tablets produced (i.e. stupid), or whether it was in deliberating picking a low margin, despite the known high risk (i.e. malice)? That's the fundamental difference whether it's a scam or not, and as an outsider, I just can't tell. Hanlon's Razor comes to mind... but malice or stupidity, I'm not gonna do high-dollar business with them again.
Now on the other hand, I think they accepted normal webstore orders after the indiegogo campaign closed; those people were actually buying something, and not only do I understand why they're pretty pissed about it, I think they're entitled to a full refund. But since I'm not one of those people, I can get over the whole thing. (Now that I type that, it reads uncomfortably much like "fuck you, I've got mine"; maybe I'm wrong to let them off the hook as much as I do, but that is how I feel.)
But do consider the big picture -- scummy as they are, they're not so different from Apple and Google, and right now Apple and Google* have the whole game to themselves. To me, the benefit of having another competitor in the game is worth pushing for, even if the third player is a little scummier than both of them.
*It's worth noting that Jolla is a much more direct competitor to Android than Apple is -- Apple doesn't license iOS to phone manufacturers, so Google has essentially no competition in this area, and most companies can accept Google's terms or leave the smartphone business (AOSP is deliberately made an impractical choice, and only a huge company, like Samsung or pre-Elop Nokia, can develop their own OS in house). The rise of any serious alternative, whether it's Jolla or something else, will drastically reduce Google's leverage.
(Score: 1) by evk on Friday September 01 2017, @11:07AM
I very much agree with this. I put money into something that I hoped would work out. It didn't, I got half the money back and may never see the rest. Too bad.