After a few months of relative silence and vagueness, we're finally getting something tangible from Jolla, the promising mobile phone company which came forth from former Nokia employees. It's ambitious - they're not just going to create a mobile operating system, not just a mobile phone, but an entire ecosystem, including cloud services and data centres. At its heart? The beautiful city of Hong Kong. The prime target market? China.
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Member since:
2010-03-11
Member since:
2010-01-11
I wonder if Jolla will have an awesomely powerful, open, and nerdy phone available by the time my Nokia N900 dies...
I wonder how many models of phones Jolla plans to market. Is the Maemo and Meego community so strong because everyone that wanted to use ended up getting the same phones?
I wonder if someday Jolla will buy Nokia... 
Member since:2011-02-11
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2008-02-10
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2012-10-02
Member since:2006-07-14
Not sure what you mean by hardware specs, From what I understand Jolla is only doing the software.
There isn't much open hardware for smartphones out there. If they really wanted to do it right, they'd be starting from scratch for all of the hardware ( cpu included).
Also, how exactly would you be independent of factories for upgrades of your phone's hardware? Even if it were all open hardware, someone would have to actually make the danged thing.
Member since:2009-06-20
Let's see... China, ARM, open-source...
http://garrys-brain.blogspot.ch/2012/04/allwinner-a10-open-source-a...
http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/
Member since:2006-07-14
That isn't open, its licensed by ARM. The drivers and what not are not open source. There is a project to write an open source driver for its Mali GPU:
http://limadriver.org/
But its still very experimental.
Member since:
2011-01-28
I can see why China makes sense due to it's huge growth potential. However I wonder if that decision was influenced at all the over-the-top patent litigation going on in the west? If they are determined to build the best products they can, then it certainly makes sense to do so in a region which is beyond the reach of western patent holders who are willing and able to exercise their government granted monopoly controls in the market.
Member since:2008-06-03
Patents are definitely one reason. Market size is another. Then there's the untapped developer potential (sheer number of graduates) and bigger availability of future sponsors/backers.
It remains to be seen whether this will serve as a double-edged sword with regards to applications. The Chinese software/app market is kinda like the US sports market. Rest of the world doesn't get it.
Jolla might end up being kick-ass like Meego, or it might end up as Baidu's version of Android... or something in-between.
Either way, best of luck to them.
Edited 2012-10-02 22:27 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
I'm genuinely curious what you mean here / some examples? :>
(BTW, some time ago I realised that Foxit is Chinese ...so maybe we also largely just don't realise how much software comes from / is made via off-shoring in PRC; Netants - my download manager of choice in dial-up days - also from there, IIRC)
Not sure if "kick-ass" is the most fortunate description... (for example http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-n9-2-en.shtml & especially considering enormous R&D costs and the time it took; not sure from where the perpetuated myth comes, perhaps some people wish to see it as better than it was; and why should be expect much different from Jolla?...)
Member since:2007-04-12
Not sure I'd put much stock in that review having used my N9 for the past 8 months now.
The updates have stabilized it greatly. Sure, the browser is lacking, but there are other options (it is Linux after all).
I'd agree, MeeGo turned out to be pretty kick-ass with Nokia's Swipe on top of it. Stability is second to none, I have no issues with multitasking. The only app that I can say will reliably give issues is the Twitter app. Other than that, the device is dead on reliable.
I have no illusions that Jolla will be MeeGo per se. But I'm certainly interested to see another Linux phone on the market.
Member since:2005-09-01
Smartphone penetration in the western countries will be nearing saturation in the next 2 years. The marking of slowdown are already visible. Then it'd be only taking about sales directly from the competitors.
China and India are where the growth will be.
In the other hand if they don't get a foothold for the Jolla services in developed markets they might loose in the long term the same way as e.g. now evidenced by the platforms what were long leading mobile innovation in Japan and Korea. They need to be on a good terms with Facebook, Twitter, mapping providers (Nokia ?:)).
Developing kick ass integration with Chinese social internet in close cooperation with those companies is a good start though.
Edited 2012-10-03 06:54 UTC
Member since:2005-09-01
Tomi Ahonen stated, that in 2011 Nokia had a pretty much done deal with biggest China telecom to push MeeGo big time. It's understandable, Chinese government wants independence from US based ecosystems to control what will no doubt be big part of economy in the comming years. They will do whats possible to hamper Google, Apple and MS services growth in that market.
In the same time they want competitive software and so far have failed in pursuing that on their own.
Maybe Jolla bets on restoring that deal, maybe.
Member since:
2012-01-13
Member since:2006-01-10
Well, the problem with all of these "Open" platforms is that they can't ever truly say it's an Open platform, just like most Linux installations aren't 100% open source. Drivers are the main issue. A lot of the drivers for mobile devices simply can't be open sourced (for example, GSM stuff that doesn't really belong to the manufacturers.)
I don't have a problem with closed source drivers. My problem is from closed source applications. I think for the most part all of the default apps should be open source. At least then if you lose support from the manufacturer, you can still update the base OS of the device, by which I mean the base install, not necessarily things like the kernel, etc.
Jolla has some awesome potential, but I think at this point the pick up rate for it will be slower than if Nokia hadn't been idiotic and let Elop's memo and announcement slip out... All but killing a project that had immense potential and tons of big corporate backing.
The problem is the same issue that 'Desktop Linux' has. People can't really say "it's so hard to use" anymore. Hell Windows 7 looks like and functions like a KDE4 clone (which is funny since earlier versions of KDE were an attempt at cloning Windows, but it started to look / act much better). The real reason 'Desktop Linux' hasn't had it's 'year' is because of the applications.
Way too many people already have a large library of software that doesn't work in Linux, or if they even have a native version, most companies make a person repurchase it. It's going to be the same with a new mobile platform, so many people have already sunk some cabbage into the mobile OS that they use most. People aren't going to want to repay for their fart apps!
Some sort of way to hook into the various app stores would be awesome. Unfortunately I don't see that happening...
I do think there needs to be a third major player though (I don't and probably never will count WPx).
Go, Jolla go!
Member since:2006-01-10
But the main problem is upgrades IMO. It's a nightmare for any user... You can't stay with the old version (like you can in Windows) because stuff is rarely backported in Linuxland ("just download the latest version, it's free" they say) and if you upgrade, you risk having your computer borked and thrown to CLI or a black screen.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll....
Actually if you use Debian (as it states later in your post) you'd see that they do indeed backport software to 'older' versions of Linux I honestly still have a server that runs (though I haven't done much to it lately since I got a new server to replace it) that was installed with Debian while it was in 'testing' of Etch, and upgraded it to 'stable' when Etch was finalized, then upgraded to Lenny when that was released. Then on to Squeeze. This is the same install over 5 years without a reinstall (Etch came out in 2007 and Squeeze came out in 2011, and I was using Etch for at least a year before it was coined stable)
Precisely why I don't like Android. It has the Linux kernel, sure, but doesn't have any of the matching userland. I think the only thing that does match is busybox.
I am student in a university (cs.uoi.gr) that runs entirely on Debian and I like it (as long as someone else does the upgrades for me). I like Ubuntu (Unity) and Mint, and yet I don't want to have Linux on my PC because I am afraid of the upgrade debacle. I do not want to do reinstalls every 6 months or mess with X.org.
The Linux community needs to stop whining about evil proprietary software, lack of apps etc and find money (a business model) to hire developers and fix their broken X.org and PulseAudio.
That pretty much sums up your issues right there. You're using Ubuntu and Mint for your desktops. When you're afraid of upgrades 'cause they'll break... I suggest Debian or something that doesn't do a release every 6 months. I would even say you should use the Ubuntu LTS releases only and just skip all the ones in between.
Just because some distributions have broken updates in the past does not mean that all Linux distributions do. Seriously, Debian (and their derivatives) are the easiest to keep up to date and working fantastically.
Ubuntu's issue is mostly that 6 month gap. Every release, they sync over Debian Unstable changes, then spend 5 months grabbing new packages, testing as fast as they can, and then doing a 'freeze' for a month, then release.
Debian on the other hand... they freeze when they like the current versions / features / software and then test and test and test... eliminating as many release critical issues they can, then finally they'll release. Freeze period is usually 6 months, the entire length of upgrade period that Ubuntu has.
For the record, the last time I had any issues with X.org not working... I was trying to win a bet with a friend about whether or not I could get Gnome-Shell working on a Pentium 2 @300Mhz with 256MB of ram. You know what? It DID work, but the fonts looked all sorts of odd with the Nouveau driver. So I tried to install the legacy nvidia driver (the graphics card was a Geforce 5500) and the legacy driver crashed, I'm guessing it didn't like Wheezy's version of X.org. But as I said, it DID work with the open source driver, so the fault isn't even X.org, but nvidia for not supporting older video cards very well.
Member since:2008-06-03
We probably won't see a mobile OS with the same "open-ness" as your regular Linux distro for quite a few years. At least until the market gets saturated enough that handsets stop evolving at the current rate. A fully open-source OS (think something like OpenBSD) is probably impossible outside niche sectors (think Geeksphone).
Edited 2012-10-02 22:26 UTC
Member since:2010-06-08
Member since:2010-03-08
Perhaps we can expect an Android-like development model, where the core project is open-source (though not necessarily under open governance) but all drivers and other hardware abstraction layers are closed-source.
That would seem like a necessity on ARM anyway, since the architecture is largely nonstandard and few SoC manufacturers if any publicly disclose their chipset's specs. At best you get something like Ti's OMAPs where TRMs are publicly distributed, but some parts of them (typically GPU specs) are lacunar or missing as they are licensed from someone else. At worst it's something like Qualcomm where hardware projects like Raspberry Pi have to put community pressure on the chip manufacturer if they want even such a lacking TRM.
Edited 2012-10-03 02:51 UTC
Member since:2010-06-08
Member since:2005-09-01
Quallcomm is quite aggressive patent wise. The hell will freeze before their legal department passes releasing specs that reveal implementation techniques, that would expose them.
Nevertheless I hope that nouveau like project will spring out sooner or later. That will of course require one SoC generation to live longer than a couple of months.
Member since:2008-06-03
There are projects like the Limadriver which currently supports Mali-200 and Mali-400 GPUs. There's also the Freedreno driver for Qualcomm/Adreno (Snapdragon, iirc) SoCs.
Problem is; all these seem to be reverse engineered, which means they'll almost always be behind their proprietary counterparts in performance.
Member since:2010-06-08
Member since:2009-09-22
Member since:
2010-06-08
Recent talk from Jussi Hurmola about ideas behind Jolla:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7vozx-pqN8
Member since:
2005-09-01
Because it represents totally different approach to mobilising Linux.
While Android is basically a start from scratch, growing from very simple and flat base (extremely simplified os layers, almost nothing derived from desktop Linux), supporting limited functionality, and growing fast.
Meego have tried to trim down existing destkop and server OS taking its time (evolving 2x longer than Android). Meego is much more integrated with overall Linux software platform and should benefit from this synergy (it will be interesting to see if it indeed does). It also bears much more development familiarity for experienced Linux programmers (98% of which are maintainers of OSS desktop apps).
One might think that Meego should have more bloat but apparently Nokia optimization engineers succeeded as (from personal observation) basic phone UI and example apps on N9, running crusty X11 behind, achieves much more consistent 60fps fluidity that Galaxy Note running CM9 and featuring relatively 2x more powerful hw. It's a great pity that QT is unavailable on Android.
Edited 2012-10-03 07:01 UTC
Member since:2010-06-08
http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/
http://blog.qt.digia.com/2012/09/18/the-journey-starts-today/
Member since:2005-09-01
Member since:
2006-05-25
"As is standard practice by now, Jolla focuses on more than smartphones alone, also looking at tablets, televisions, automotive, and other devices".
This is what Nokia lost with WP: the opportunity to expand its bussiness beyond phones (the same thing Apple did with the iPod and iPad when it was mostly a computer company).
Member since:
2010-04-06