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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by WizardFusion on Friday April 24 2015, @11:38AM
So if this is true, then they haven't even starting building them yet.?
What have they been doing.?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @10:21PM
So if this is true, then they haven't even starting building them yet.?
They're waiting for Sailfish 2.0 (the OS) to be completed before they start building the tablets. I ordered one when they were announced, and so far I've gotten several emails about their progress, HW upgrades, etc (the emails are not as good as a tablet though).
I'm glad they've held off manufacturing the tablets until Sailfish is ready. Newer hardware options have become available at the same price points of the originally spec'd components, so we're going to get a better device for our money. More processing power means the device can be a little more forgiving if the OS isn't as optimized as they originally intended.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday April 24 2015, @12:46PM
Much anticipated? By who? Does anyone care about an also-ran tablet? If it had not slipped, would anyone care?
(Using a name that conflicts with La Jolla, California for pronunciation wasn't the best idea, either.)
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1) by yarp on Friday April 24 2015, @01:25PM
I would hazard a guess it's anticipated by more than 20,000 people who stumped up over 2.5 million USD in funding. Aside from that it offers a break from the norm in choice of OS and attracted an honour at a recent show, so there's probably some substance to it.
So how does one pronounce "La Jolla" in California? I'm not sure there will be much confusion.
(Score: 5, Informative) by FatPhil on Friday April 24 2015, @01:41PM
The Finnish one should in Finnish be pronounced like "yolla", but apparently the top guys didn't want to confuse people with Finnish pronunciation rules so decided that it would instead be pronounced as it reads, with the /dz/ 'j' sound at the start. Very few of the Finns and Finnish residents working for the company got that memo. Which of course means that there's now confusion caused by the attempt to reduce confusion. This is the kind of Nokian decision-making which fucked Maemo/Meego, and really doesn't make me feel confident that Jolla's going to be any better managed.
Disclaimer: ex-Maemo/Meego dev, know a load of engineers at Jolla.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:24AM
I would hazard a guess it's anticipated by more than 20,000 people who stumped up over 2.5 million USD in funding
That would be one in 300,000 people, assuming that 6 billion live on this Earth. Most cities will not have even one such enthusiast.
Myself, I wouldn't want to get one. Why to bother? There are many other tablets on the market, today and for less money, and they all will run your software. Who would want to code for a device that only three persons per million have? But even if we ignore this aspect, how would I personally benefit from this device? I checked the Web site, and they don't say much. The only difference I see is that they support resizing of windows. Probably not something that you want to do on a small tablet. But if that's important... why not to hack Android's WM [stackexchange.com]?
(Score: 1) by archshade on Friday April 24 2015, @02:11PM
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 24 2015, @05:08PM
If it can run Android apps and enable users to control what spying they can carry out it will be better than original Android environment regardless. I suspect the OS in itself will have less lock-in crap builtin as well.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 24 2015, @08:44PM
I was thinking the same thing.
Jolla makes a big deal on their pages about protecting user's privacy, but the more you read, the less it seems to say.
They mostly promise not to sell your info to anyone.
I'd love to see their android emulation layer have the ability, with fine grained control, to provide true, bogus, or zero data to android applications, as well as user authorization of each url/ip address the the application tries to access.
Obviously, authorizing every IP a web browser tried to access would be impractical, (you'd need to switch that off), but for some random app from the android market it would be nice to approve or disapprove any attempt (with the system providing you whois info for your decision).
I suspect you will have to side load all these apps anyway.
I've been following the forum about Sailfish (as it is used on the phone).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 25 2015, @12:47AM
If Jolla is for privacy they will:
* Allow other operating systems to use the same hardware (f*ck signed boot)
* Allow users to load apps as they see fit
* Provide fine grained control of app privileges
* Provide the source code to enable audit and modification
* Not add any phone-home or backdoor
And any computing system without a C compiler is made to be user hostile by definition.
The whole "smartphone" ecosystem is fucked up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @10:20PM
It doesn't conflict for procunciation at all. Jolla has a Y-sounding J, and the double-L makes an L sound. La Jolla has an H-sounding J and the double-L makes a Y-sound. Yolla/Hoya - not even remotely homophonous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @11:41PM
> Much anticipated? By who?
by people wanting a smartphone. You know, that mobile + computer combination that basically is unattainable since the nokia n900.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @01:23PM
"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."
Sorry, but Sailfish is NOT based on Ubuntu. It was, at one point, based on Mer, but that is NOT the same thing as Ubuntu's Mir, which is intended as a replacement of the X Window System.
As a matter of fact, after the split from Nokia, Sailfish shifted from Debian-based packages (such as the Nokia N900) to RPM packages.
The Sailfish stack runs Linux Kernel + RPM packages + the Wayland display server, and has been this way since launch in late 2013.
I had the original Jolla phone at launch, and have been waiting for my Jolla tablet since November.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 24 2015, @05:06PM
Will Jolla tablet be "system'd" ?
(Score: 2) by jbernardo on Friday April 24 2015, @07:17PM
Unfortunately, yes. For some time, they were the main driving force behind systemd.
(Score: 5, Funny) by MrGuy on Friday April 24 2015, @01:44PM
A company spokesman confirmed the delay was due to a crippling umlaut shortage.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @10:11PM
Äijänpäivänjärvi - I can't pronounce it. I can't spell it. And after copy-and-pasting it my mouse has gone it a sulk.
(Score: 2, Informative) by benmhall on Friday April 24 2015, @10:52PM
> 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.)