Search Results for: sailfish

And so, a day before I leave for Italy for my Summer vacation, we've got some... News about Jolla. The company just put out a press release, announcing a focus shift.

The press release - of course - frames this as happy news, but years of experience in covering technology (or just years of not living under a rock, really) has taught me that moves like this are never borne out of desire, but out of necessity. Combined with several delays of Jolla's tablet and of Sailfish 2.0, it's hard not to conclude the company (companies?) is facing bleak times.

I haven't exactly kept my displeasure with the slow pace of progress regarding Sailfish development a secret, and I've had worries about the company's future for a long time now. The Jolla phone is now 19 months old, and it wasn't exactly flagship-quality to begin with when it was first released in December 2013. While there's been considerable updates to Sailfish 1.0, it, too, is now 19 months old. In addition, the promised support for paid applications never arrived.

One also has to wonder just how wise it was to focus on building a tablet. Tablets don't get replaced very often, and they are a far smaller market than smartphones. In addition, adding a whole new form factor to support is surely to negatively affect the smartphone experience. Had the company instead focused on releasing a new phone, we might have had it sooner - no new form factor to develop - and we'd have a replacement for the under-performing original Jolla phone. Hindsight, though, right?

Regarding the tablet:

I hope the company can stay afloat long enough to ensure we get our tablets (I ordered one within minutes of the announcement). Maybe things are not as bleak as I make them out to be here, but I'm not exactly getting the positive vibes.

Patel has a point - the rise of all these streaming music services has completely undone the end of DRM in the music industry. It's most likely entirely unrelated, but Steve Jobs' scathing letter condemning the use of DRM is no longer available on Apple's website - just as Apple is rumoured to launch its own streaming music service.

The same has happened in IM, chat, messaging, or whatever you want to call it. It's 2015, and I have five messaging applications on my smartphone - WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messenger, Hangouts, Skype - and I also use iMessage occasionally (on OS X) because some of my friends are locked into it and don't want to use something else. These companies - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook - are actively and consciously making the choice to make the lives of their customers as difficult as possible.

If these companies really cared about their customers - as they always claim they do - they would've come together and used or developed a proper open standard for messaging. Instead, we get Facebook (through WhatsApp) banning users for using 3rd party WhatsApp clients on Sailfish, or we have Apple making grandiose promises about turning FaceTime into an open standard, but then backtracking once they realise they can frustrate and lock-in consumers by keeping it closed. Google, meanwhile, seems to have no idea what it's doing at all, flipflopping left and right (Hangouts? Messenger? What's it going to be, Google?). Skype is Skype.

Now that iOS and Android (and to a lesser degree, Windows Phone) are entirely and wholly interchangeable, companies are looking for other ways to lock their consumers into their platforms - and much like in music, the companies are placing their own interests above that of their consumers.

As Slashdot notes:

I would strongly advise against using any non-WhatsApp approved clients. Users of the unofficial WhatsApp client for Sailfish, Mitakuuluu, got banned from WhatsApp for using an unofficial client, after which Mitakuuluu's developer ceased development. Know what you're getting into!

During an emotional speech delivered today at the Slush conference, Jolla's Marc Dillon unveiled the company's next product: the Jolla tablet, running Sailfish OS 2.0. He launched a crowdfunding campaign for the tablet, with a goal of $380,000 - which was achieved in less than three hours (this may be one of the fastest funding consumer electronics devices ever). I got in early, and was one of the very first people to back the tablet (just as I was one of the first to back the Jolla phone a year ago). A second round has already been announced. Big news for American readers: it'll be available in the US too.

The tablet itself is very similar in specifications to Nokia's N1 tablet, with an 1.8GHz quad-core Intel processor, 2GB RAM, 2048x1536 330ppi 7.85" IPS display, 32GB storage, and all the usual sensors and ports you have come to expect. It's quite light and compact, and has its own design - there's no way people are going to twist this one into an iPad copy.

The tablet is expected to be delivered to us early backers in May 2015, and I can't wait. Also, Mr. Dillon, keep rocking that beard.

I'm lucky. My financial situation allows me to buy several phones and tablets every year to keep up with the goings-on of all the major - and some of the minor - platforms currently competing for prime real estate in your precious pockets. It also means that I am lucky from a psychological point of view - by being able to buy several devices every year, I never fall into the all-too-common trap of choice-supportive bias. I don't have to rationalise my device purchases after the fact, so I won't have to employ all sorts of mental gymnastics to solve any states of cognitive dissonance caused by hardware and software flaws - the number one cause of irrational fanboyism.

And so, I try to rotate my phone of choice around as much as possible. I enjoy jumping from Android to my N9, then onwards to Sailfish, back to Android, and then have some fun with Symbian on my E7 - and beyond. I've got a long list of platforms I want to add to the collection - one white BlackBerry Passport please - but in general, I'm pretty well-rounded.

It's been a while since we've done one of these, so here we go: some detailed platform and browser statistics for OSNews. They're collected using Google Analytics, between 12 April and 12 May. As always, these statistics are only relevant for OSNews, and can, in no way, be extrapolated to any other site.

Jonathan Mahler, on 'long-form' articles:

Up until the moment I read this article, I had no idea there was a specific term for long(er) articles, let alone that some consider it a genre. I realised that virtually all of my reviews are apparently "long-form"; the Jolla review, for instance, was 9000 words long. I've done much crazier than that, though - the Palm article was 22000 words long.

However, in both of these cases, I never intended for the articles to become that long, or in fact, to achieve any specific length. When I start out, I just have a number of things that I want to discuss, and I won't stop writing until all of those things are in the article. I will make a distinction between things that get lots of attention (say, the gestures in Sailfish) and things that get a passing mention (e.g., the backplate), usually based on some sort of combination between what I personally find interesting and what you, the readers, might find interesting. Since the gestures in Sailfish are at the core of the user experience, it gets a lot of attention; because the backplate and its hardware potential offers little to no benefit right now, it gets a passing mention.

I also like to pick some sort of overarching red thread, like the whole The Last Resort thing in the Jolla/Sailfish review, to tie everything together and frame the article. This can be a dangerous thing, since it's usually very personal and can easily be misinterpreted as pretentious or have other unwelcome side-effects. Originally, I framed the Jolla/Sailfish article using Manifest Destiny, but I quickly realised that its pitch-black consequences were unacceptable in a mere technology article.

Combine these things, and the article is done. Whether the resulting article turns out to be 2000 words or 10000 words is irrelevant to me; if it contains everything I want to convey, it's done. If it leaves things out just to be short and more digestible, it's a bad article. If it contains useless, irrelevant crap just to pad the word count, it's a bad article. Years ago, when both my best friend and I were writing our master's theses, we ended up with very, very different word counts - mine was 27000, hers was a mere 8000. Both contained all the required information; nothing more and nothing less. Both were graded positively. Word count is a measure of nothing.

By now, some of you might be wondering why the sales pitch for the Palm article did contain the word count - which seems to contradict the above. My reasoning there was simple: we were selling the Palm article. I figured that since I was asking people to pay money for an article that was freely available on that very same page, I should at least give them information about what they were spending their money on.

Long articles like the ones mentioned above are not for everyone. In fact, their potential audience is much, much smaller than, say, a three paragraph jab at software patents. While those jabs are fun - sort of - it's these long articles that are by far the most fulfilling to write. The Palm article alone took months and months of work - research, making notes, educating myself about low-level stuff, devising a structure, setting a tone, organising the six hundred different subjects I wanted to cover, the actual writing process, revising it all, while also doing my regular job, and so on - but it is by far the most rewarding experience I've ever had for OSNews.

I'll never forget getting emails from former Palm executives and engineers - big names - congratulating me on a job well done.

Writing articles like that is not easy, with my biggest enemy being a lack of time because OSNews is a hobby, not a full-time job (I wish it was!). A few weeks after publishing the Palm article, I started work on a similar article about Psion and Symbian, but due to work and personal life (which was rather tumultuous in 2013) sucking up a lot of time last year, I never found the time to continue work on it. With things having settled down since December, I'm making plans to dust off the Psion and Symbian material, possibly take a few weeks off work, and finish it.

That article could end up being 8000 words, or 50000 words. I don't know. The goal is not be long, but to be comprehensive, and this is my inherent problem with the term "long-form". This term puts the focus on length instead of content, which absolutely baffles me. A good article is not defined by its length - or lack thereof - but by its content.

In October 2011, with the writing on the wall after Nokia switched to Windows Phone and closed the long-running MeeGo project, several former Maemo Nokians left the company ("Nokia was a coward"). With support from their old employer through the Nokia Bridge program, but without any access to Nokia's intellectual property or patents, the new company - called Jolla - continued the work that spawned the legendary N9, only able to use the open source parts of that phone's software.

Late 2013, their work culminated in Sailfish, running on their own smartphone, the Jolla. In a way, this device and its software has been in the making since 2004-2005, and considering the rocky roads and many challenges these people had to overcome between then and now, the phone sometimes seems to radiate defiance and determination.

Stefano Mosconi (CTO of Jolla) gives a review of the past year, talking about decisions and developments in the company such as changing the SoC manufacturer for their first handset, switching to Wayland with Qt5 for Sailfish and opening their Web store and co-creation site.

More good news for Jolla and Sailfish. On the Finnish carrier DNA, the only carrier currently selling the device, Jolla outsold the iPhone 5S, 5C, Galaxy S4, and every Lumia except the 520. Jolla ended up as number five, preceded by the Lumia 520 in fourth place, the Galaxy SIII 4G in third, and two cheap Galaxy phones as two and one. Sales cover the holiday period.

Of course, with Finland having a small population and Jolla having the home team advantage, this isn't exactly representative for, well, anything, but it's still impressive and good news for the young platform. The fact that Jolla outsold the flagships of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone holds promise for the future. On top of that, out of that top five, the Jolla is the most expensive phone (save for perhaps the Galaxy SIII).

I'm curious to see if they'll be able to maintain this momentum. It's not going to be easy.

PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.

Almost exactly three years ago, I wrote about why OSNews was no longer OSNews: the alternative operating system scene had died, and OSNews, too, had to go with the times and move towards reporting on a new wave of operating systems - mobile, and all the repercussions that the explosion of smartphones and tablets have caused. Still, I was wondering something today: why aren't we seeing alternative operating systems on mobile?

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Google is growing increasingly concerned with Samsung's dominance of the Android - and smartphone - landscape. Supposedly, the topic is being openly discussed at Google, and as far as I'm concerned, that's great news.

A Jolla (Sailfish) developer and a Canonical (Ubuntu Phone) developer walk into a KDE/Plasma IRC channel, and fire up a conversation about the QML component API. Not long after, the first fruits of this conversation become apparent. Aaron Seigo (who uses punctuation these days!): "Well, one thing led to another and Zoltan posted an email to the Qt Components mailing list summing up the conversation and proposing we bring our APIs into better alignment. We hope to address issues of API drift between the various component sets out there. This is a pain point others have identified, such as in this recent blog post by Johan Thelin. There is much work to be done before we can even think of calling this a success, but it's the right sort of start." Great news.