The first production batch of Jolla smartphones has been fully booked by consumers and selected sales channels. Jolla launched its first smartphone at the #JollaLoveDay event inMay. At the same time, Jolla kicked off an online pre-order campaign, which reached its first batch limit by mid-July. Online pre-orders were received from 136 countries in all.
I’m one of those who pre-ordered, so it’s good news for me. They won’t reveal just how many people placed a pre-order, but they do state that a typical batch (as mentioned) is about 50000 units.
So is this phone more successful than the Ubuntu phone?
I’m not sure what unit of “success” you would use to measure the two products.
As far as I understand, they’re at different stages of development and are being developed pretty differently. Jolla said, “We designed a phone, here’s a prototype that you can try out, here’s the SDK and development environment, who would like to preorder one?”, whereas Ubuntu said, “We have this idea for a new type of phone, does anyone like the idea enough to contribute money to its development?”.
For me it means to be able to buy it without major issues from any shop, and have an App Store where all relevant applications are available.
That’s true, that would be a sign of success, but keep in mind that Jolla are purposefully NOT targeting places like the US and are targeting places like China.
I hope it’ll be easy to order one from jolla.com for places where they’re not sold in stores.
Not yet targeting, i.e. at launch. They plan to target them later.
Last time I heard, they were actually actively avoiding the US because of software patents. But we’ll see.
Avoiding in the beginning. They said before they plan to address US and other markets as well later, especially if they’ll see a demand, so you can go and register to demonstrate it.
Edited 2013-08-23 00:42 UTC
Apart of software patents issue, on hardware side before they reach the US market, do they need to get a certification from FCC for their device?
It is my bias. I don’t see Canonical succeeding. An easy to use fast on lowend hardware OS I do see succeeding.
Jolla has a real product in the final stages of production. Whether it will succeed – time will tell. Canonical doesn’t have any hardware to demonstrate at all. So what exactly are you comparing?
Edited 2013-08-21 16:03 UTC
Obviously yes.
This is a phone. Ubuntu phone is a unicorn – only people on ACID believe in them.
They pulled a stunt to get publicity so they could fund proper funding from a big player. The kickstarted thing they knew wasn’t going to work.
Exactly, it was a pure stunt. Instead, they could do something actually useful and crowdfund the development of glibc EGL drivers for some major mobile GPU for example.
Edited 2013-08-21 18:20 UTC
Except nobody wants to work with glibc, because they act like arseholes.
http://blog.aurel32.net/47
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/debian-ditches-glibc-eglibc
As ubuntu is based on debian moved away as well, so is little benefit of them helping to develop drivers when their OS doesn’t even use it.
In any-case it is really not up to anyone except for Canonical how they invest their time and money. Their stunt btw, evidence in this comment section alone did seem to work.
Edited 2013-08-21 19:06 UTC
glibc changed the governance approach lately. It was an issue of the main maintainer who made all decisions in the past. Your links are old, so the situation has changed since.
Where did you see that Canonical moved away from using glibc by the way?
Sure, Canonical can do whatever they want with their stunts. I was saying that it wasn’t useful for Linux in general. But that’s Canonical for you.
Edited 2013-08-21 19:50 UTC
You mean Drepper being an arsehole. Good it has changed because the guy was a major dickhead.
They moved at 9.10, which admittedly was a few years ago. So it may have changed. I don’t really keep up on these things, I just remember hearing about them.
If Debian hasn’t moved back to glibc, then I doubt Ubuntu did either.
Well if they can do that, then why complain about it. The license allows it and if you don’t like it you gotta suck it up.
I’m not even aware that Debian moved away from glibc
glibc is the ubiquitous libc used in desktop Linux, and in such mobile ones like Mer derivatives. I dind’t specifically check Ubuntu Phone, but I assumed it uses glbc as well.
Edited 2013-08-21 20:17 UTC
Well they got fed up with this Ulrich Drepper guy and went to another project or forked it.
If this chap or his project weren’t being helpful to bug reports etc. Then most likely it would put a lot of devs off from using it, especially when embarking on a new OS project.
Yeah, he was a jerk. He basically decided that glibc was x86 and amd64 only. Glibc was run like his only personal fifedom. He was a very talented developer, but with poor social/management skills. glibc was largely written by his considerable effort.
But yeah debian got tired of having stuff rejected by him so they started using the embedded version eglibc which was source and binary compatible, but had other patches for non x86 systems. I don’t think they’ve switched back yet.
Here’s the osnews story when that happened:
http://www.osnews.com/story/21441/Debian_Switching_to_EGLIBC
Ah, thanks for the link. They key here is binary compatibility though. Nothing even remote exists between glibc/eglibc and bionic for example.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
“Yeah, he was a jerk…”
Whatever could you mean?
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4980
Quality stuff in there, even fitting as a tombstone epitaph…
“Of course it gains something, otherwise it would not have been added.” – Ulrich Drepper
The guy was deliberately difficult to work with.
Drepper is an even bigger confrontational jerk than Linus Torvalds and Theo deRadt combined.
Just look at the output of
aptitude show libc6
On any recent Debian or Ubuntu release. Is eglibc, not glibc.
What has the C runtime library have to do with device drivers?!
Quite a lot when it comes to some of them. Closed GPU drivers are split into the kernel and userspace parts (blobs), I guess for GPL reasons. Those blobs have dependency on libc and are highly tailored for it. I.e. bionic based blob is useless if you use glibc. And it means you’ll have no accelerated graphics on that hardware. That’s why such project as libhybris was created, to make a translation hack.
See:
* http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-g…
* http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-android-g…
Also, it happens that different EGL drivers are not generic, and can’t be easily shared between different display servers. One for X.org is useless for Wayland and so on. So the situation with closed drivers is a complete and utter mess, and Canonical could spend time improving it. Either fund creating open drivers, or fund pushing manufacturers to produce closed ones if first option is impossible, and so on.
Edited 2013-08-22 02:04 UTC
Well the problem is mainly caused by dynamic linking to bionic in the case of binary blobs, the way I see it.
Not that the C runtime library offers special features for writing drivers.
Which does not make sense from the ANSI/ISO point of view.
The problem is caused by the simple fact of binary incompatibility between bionic and glibc. And since as you noted dynamic linking happens, bionic blobs render those GPU drivers useless for glibc based distros. So of course it’s not the fault of libc, it’s the fault of vendors not making these drivers open and / or producing them for glibc as well.
You get into the same sort of problems when using libraries generated from different C compilers.
Too early to tell.
sigh Looks like I’ll have to preorder next time if I want one.
It’s for the best, I suppose. For someone like me who doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on electronics, I should probably at least read the reviews of the Jolla mobile before considering getting one.
I’d say one can’t really talk about a preorder, since you don’t have to buy the phone in the end.
And do they also count the people who registered but choose not to pay? Because I registered to show my interest, and not because I’m sure that I’m going to buy one (depends on the hardware and the amount of FOSS [UI!]).
But of course, for the marketing it sounds better to say that they’re sold out.
I’m not sure, but if “The first production batch of Jolla smartphones fully booked” then that means to me that I won’t be able to buy one unless I preordered, which would imply that they were “real” preorders.
Having worked on the telecommunications industry I can say to you not to expect it to be more open than Android.
Meaning, what is closed in Android, will remain closed in any other mobile distribution of Linux.
I registered for $0 option, and waiting for the device to be available, since full pre-orders were only for Europe so far.
I imagine Thom has all of them attached to his belt, each with a separate phone number. At any given moment, one of them is sure to ring, beep or buzz. Eventually, his friends tire of his constant interruptions, and one of them hits him on the head with a phablet, steals all of the phones, and pawns them to buy cheap whiskey from Ireland. Fortunately, Fiona Apple sings at his funeral and dazzles everyone with her rendition of the old spiritual, “What a dork we have in Thom, all our phones and beeps to wear…” — or something like that.
Hm. Finnegan’s Wake would be probably more appropriate in that context:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L6QTwZDzak4
Edited 2013-08-21 19:59 UTC
Thom, another month another phone. Sure you have space for the stuff?
You don’t see the plan? He’s trying to get enough phones to tile his kitchen with the old ones.
Wouldn’t those cheapo Android craptablets be a better option in terms of cost to surface area ratio?
Can anybody tell me how Sailfish’s multitasking work?
All I can find on it seems to focus on the INTERFACE to the multitasking.
Is just a generalized multitasking system with whatever running in the background?
Or does it prevent B/G programs in general, aside from a few limited API features, more like iOS?
The latter is really the way to go in mobile IMHO, I don’t want to worry about managing
loads of programs running in the background sucking energy.
Overall, it seems great, QT but also with Android compatability. I never was impressed with Android, but having app compatability is a big thing for a small new OS entrant. And QT is of course an already existing API, so there’s that much less friction to getting ‘native’ development (especially given that QT apps should be portable to Android/iOS with more library overhead).
(although the background/multitasking issue may be relevant for some Android apps)
Going in for the preorder wasn’t my cup of tea, but I feel well disposed to picking up a Sailfish phone in the future.
It seems less ‘open’ than Ubuntu phone, but not really enough to be a problem.
I think I can answer this… Based on how Maemo works and what I’ve seen of SailfishOS.
It is “true” normal desktop-style multitasking. You control what runs and when it stops. When you start an application it will run fullscreen. When you go to the home screen you will see a box with a small representation of the application. Developers can design it so the small versions have a simplified GUI so you can control from the home screen.
On Maemo, I usually have one application running, a text editor with my ToDo list. At most I’ll have something like, maybe, nine applications (text editor x2, terminal x2, media player, web browser, chat x2, email). I just tap the “X” to close them when I’m done. It’s never been a problem. Sometimes, for fun, I’ll load a whole buttload of applications to see how many need to run before the N900 starts to choke. I never come close to that number in real world usage.
I don’t know the use case for Android or iOS. I like how I can play music / movies, do FTP transfers, load stuff, whatever and not have to worry about whether or not it will continue in the background when I switch applications, because it always does, just as if it was in the foreground. I know this issue has bugged my coworker, who uses Android, a bit.
Seems as ubuntu phone i also heading that way, ie. ‘application developers are dumb so the user must be protected from them’. That might very well be the case, but I really have a hard time seeing any drawbacks with the true multitasking of the N9.
Even if only one out of 10 applications loses context when switching to another, that will be enough to make you feel uneasy about multitasking when doing something of the slightest importance. For instance when in the middle of filling out a webform, can you be sure that if switching to eg. the email app to copy some text you forgot, when returning to the webform you are still exactly where you left off? Does this always work on android, iphone and win phone? Does turn by turn voice navigation still work if a passenger starts to write an email or will you miss the exit because of that? Is the ssh session still going while answering an sms? I really don’t know how the mainstream phones work but whenever I try to use an android I constantly have the feeling that I don’t know what will happen when I try to multitask.
The maemo/meego and seemingly Jolla leaves it up to the app developers to not suck battery when the app is in the background, and gives the user an obvious way to know if an app is running or not and an obvious way to manage them. That is something I very much prefer over the alternatives that not only tries to manage everything so the user doesn’t have to care, they also hide the state of applications so the user cannot manage them even if he would benefit from being able to do it.
Of course if meego would have been allowed to take off, then it’s completely possible that the appstore would be filled with battery sucking apps written by morons, that we will never know.
Right ?
http://www.osnews.com/story/27277/Android_is_Linux
Yes.