Last month we did a quick exercise aiming to see how far we could get in a few weeks in porting Sailfish OS to a new kind of mobile device, an Android smartwatch. Compared to the competition, Sailfish OS’s interaction paradigm is particularly suited for small screens, it being gesture-driven and designed to maximize display estate available for the user content. We also had the watch demo with us as a teaser in Slush 2016 this week, to emphasize to journalists, partners and other people how versatile platform Sailfish OS is. And naturally an implementation like this, could fit nicely also into our licensing strategy.
This looks pretty good, actually, but as an owner of the limited edition version of the Jolla Phone and the incredibly elusive and rare Jolla Tablet – what I want is not more device categories, it’s applications.
This has been the platform’s number one weakness since its inception, and they seem unwilling to do anything about it.
First off, I must insist that you are a bastard. I believe I am still waiting for the second half of my refund from Jolla for the tablet.
Second, it seems more likely that they simply can’t get developers to port the apps over., not so much that they are unwilling. The great thing about Maemo and MeeGo was that they already had tons of Linux apps that could be easily installed, Jolla should be the same, right? Lots of community app support for the other two, but yeah unfortunately software is what makes or breaks a platform. Perfect examples of this is Windows vs anything else in the late 80s. If it weren’t for the software support in DOS, the Amiga, Atari ST and Mac would have crushed it. But instead we saw all the business applications created for DOS, then Windows and the other platforms lost support and wventually the jardware advantages became irrelevant.
Mobile industry pretty much happened the same way, Nokia never got their store out of Beta, and Jolla just supplants their library with Android software, most of which is pretty terribly designed.
Granted I am in the same boat already with my watch (Gear S2 Classic 4G) since it runs Tizen and as massive as Samsung is, it is still hard for them to pull devs from Google or Apple.
This is only marginally useful. Anything with a UI will need changes for proper touch support or so, so anything more complex will quickly need a whole custom UI, and for most apps that ends up being almost a total rewrite.
Besides that, only the “heavy” apps seems to be interesting to develop for desktop these days, anything else is either a mobile app, or a web app…
I’m not saying I find these developments an improvement, just pointing out what I’m seeing around me these days….
Yeah, I will agree with that, though tlwith the stylus on the n900 non- touch designed applications weren’t too terrible, and with a hardware keyboard it was the closest thing I have ever used to having a portable computer in your pocket.
… it could actually work!
When you think about it, the demand for “apps” on a smartwatch is not the same as on a smartphone and thus there is no ecosystem advantage to any industry player, so to speak. Of course, it still leaves implementation details such as integration with existing gadgets through Bluetooth but that is doable.
And the Sailfish OS with its mostly gesture-based interaction model is actually well suited for a smartwatch, at least as we have seen them so far, much more so than Android or iOS, for example.
That said, I am not sure it is wise for them to spread their resources on multiple directions like that but then, it appears to be a simple proof-of-concept so far, right?
From what I saw in the video this looks much nicer than Tizen and Apple watch, I haven’t really played with an Android one, but this is pretty impressive. Would love some Sailfish gadgets.