In this review, I’ll give a little bit of history, and, of course, cover the phone and its software. Surprisingly, a conclusion wraps it all up.
Shadows of the old world
She came from Providence, the one in Rhode Island
Where the old world shadows hang heavy in the air
She packed her hopes and dreams like a refugee
Way back in 2005, when PDA’s still mattered (somewhat) and smartphones were starting to gain a small foothold in the market, a small team within Nokia, with limited resources, released the first product in what would become an illustrious series of mobile devices: the Linux-based Nxxx series.
This first device, the Nokia N770, didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but that had little to do with the aspirations behind the product. Before the iPhone, before Android, and before modern tablets, the small team behind the N770 developed a Linux-based mobile operating system geared towards things we now do on our smartphones and tablets every day – web browsing, emailing, keeping up with the news, and so on.
The goal of Open Source Software Operations, as the team was called, was ambitious; they wanted to build a product that would “change the world”. Despite all this ambition, this didn’t exactly happen. As Sampsa Kurri detailed in his article about the history of MeeGo, OSSO was underfunded, understaffed, and faced opposition from Nokia’s all-powerful Symbian team from the very beginning.
Nokia’s poisonous internal politics frustrated development efforts for OSSO. They couldn’t include phone functionality, for instance, because the Symbian managers didn’t want them to. They had to resort to outsourcing for many, many aspects of both hardware and software, yet they did not have the manpower for proper Q&A, leading to low-quality, underpowered, non-integrated hardware and buggy software.
The first actual smartphone in the Nxxx series was the N900, released in late 2009. This device suffered from the same dodgy development issues as its predecessors, and on top of that, the Symbian managers were reportedly so afraid of Maemo’s progress over Symbian that they wielded their power to slow Maemo down wherever they could. Still, despite all this, the N900 has gained an incredibly loyal following over the years.
Unlike many other devices, the N900 is essentially completely open, and is running what we would call a complete, ‘traditional’ Linux distribution. Combined with its excellent keyboard, this made the N900 remarkably hacker-friendly. My brother is one of those N900 users, and I get the feeling you can pry the N900 from his cold, dead hands (he has a second spare one in case his current one dies). I used his N900 for a few weeks as my primary phone, and I found it slow, cumbersome, frustrating, heavy, and generally unpleasant to use – yet I still loved messing around with it, since it felt like using a real computer, instead of a locked-down, idiot-proof “smart”-phone.
While I wouldn’t want to use an N900 on a daily basis myself, I understand those who do.
It weren’t just the Symbian managers who frustrated the development of Maemo; Nokia’s upper management itself played a huge role, too. In 2010, Nokia joined hands with Intel to merge Maemo and Intel’s Moblin into MeeGo. The result of this was that two different projects with different ideas, philosophies, and goals had to be merged into one, coherent project. This wasn’t an easy task, and frustrated development even more.
And then.
A burning platform. A former Microsoft executive. Nokia announcing it would switch its entire smartphone business over to Windows Phone, leaving both Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo to rot and die. As many predicted at the time, it would prove to be a bet on the wrong platform – Microsoft had to buy Nokia’s mobile division just to keep it from falling apart. But, that’s a story for another time.
Elop’s decision to focus solely on Windows Phone had one very important side-effect: the Maemo/MeeGo team was suddenly free from all the internal politics, and this meant that they could finally focus on building the best smartphone they possibly could. This phone would be end-of-life even before it appeared on the shelves, and it would have no future. It would be a last big hurrah, a last-ditch, all-in effort – and it resulted in a device that I think is one of the most beautiful and unique pieces of technology ever conceived by a major player.
The Nokia N9 is a design masterpiece, in both hardware and software. The N9 perfects the design language shaped by the Symbian E7 and N8 devices, to a minimalistic unibody polycarbonate shell, without any buttons on the front of the device (only a volume rocker and lock button on the right side). Its display is ‘draped’ on top of the front side of the device, slightly curved at its edges, and its ridiculously deep blacks make it near impossible to tell where the display ends and the bezel begins.
The white model – the illusive ‘unicorn phone’ – is, to me, still the most beautiful phone ever designed.
The N9 is a perfect combination of hardware and software. The display with slightly rounded edges invite the edge swipes that define the N9’s unique user interface. MeeGo Harmattan had an innovative user interface in which you swiped between the application launcher, a list of running applications, and a notification feed. Words really cannot do justice to the N9 – you really need to use one to understand just how special it is. As soon as you pick one up, everything just ‘clicks’ – without a single instruction or hesitation.
Almost everything about the N9 hits all the right notes. The weight, the shape, the curved glass, the size, the swipes – it all makes just enough sense. Many of you will wave this away as silly hyperbole, but it really isn’t. Just find any of the original reviews of the N9, and they all more or less have the same things to say. I implore you to get your hands on an N9 – borrow it, buy it second hand, anything.
I didn’t italicise ‘almost’ for nothing, though. Like the Nxxx devices that came before it, the N9 suffered from many of the same flaws. The device’s specifications were, again, underpowered, causing the software to lag often, applications to open very slowly, and so on. One of the most common things you’ll hear from N9 users or people familiar with the N9 – “Harmattan should have had more power to play with”. In fact, if it weren’t for its underpowered internals, the 2011 N9 would still make for a very good competitor to today’s devices, which is testament to its creators.
The N9 was a unique, one-of-a-kind masterpiece. The hardware was decidedly Nokia, the operating system was decidedly Maemo, and the Swipe user interface was decidedly third party – it was designed by New York-based design studio 80/20, which was later acquired by Square (as a non-American – who?), never to be heard from again. The N9 is one of those rare products born out of a once-in-a-lifetime planetary alignment coinciding with a perfect storm of circumstances. The device was not without its faults – but it takes imperfection to notice perfection.
And this, this is the legacy Jolla is building upon. Free from the shadows of the old world, Jolla has the ability to focus on its hopes and dreams, instead of having to fight the erratic twitches of a dying old-world shadow. While the Maemo and N9 heritage can definitely be seen in Sailfish and Jolla, it’s very much a different device. It’s better exactly in the areas that matter, and worse in the areas that simply don’t matter as much.
Let’s actually start talking about the subject of this review.
Now if I can just get a Neo900 http://neo900.org/ running Sailfish…
OSNews may well be one of the few tech sites i know that can mention the Nokia Internet Tablets without a followup “what’s that?”.
Ever so often i ponder reflashing my N800, as right now it rests in a drawer with a messed up FS.
Great review. The conclusion matches to my experience with that beautiful device.
Some Jolla users called that bright color “screaming lifejacket orange” to highlight the connection to marine theme which is common in Jolla.
Edited 2014-01-30 20:30 UTC
i haven’t oredered my jolla yet because i wanted to read a trusted review first. Sure the main reason i got interested with this phone is purely ideological (F/LOSS and what not) but i want a phone i can use and even enjoy using.
Reading your review reassure me that this is the phone for me.
The Jolla Mobila does not mount as a mass storage device. Instead, it uses MTP (like Android). The reasons are explained here:
https://together.jolla.com/question/10002/alternative-to-mtp-usb-mas…
https://together.jolla.com/question/1480/unable-to-access-internal-s…
Sounds like a good decision to me. So if you use Windows I think it will automatically mount as if it was a USB drive, if you use Mac OS X I don’t think there’s ANY way to mount it currently, and if you use Linux… well, anything’s possible in Linux.
Linux has had MTP support via libmtp for a while now. I’ve used it on Arch, Slackware, and Debian. I think the GNOME DE supports it natively too.
One drawback to MTP versus USB mass storage is that you can only perform one file operation at a time. You can queue them, but don’t expect fast, parallel transfers.
Besides MTP you can expose shares using CIFS, NFS or other similar remote filesystems, as long as Linux supports them.
Edited 2014-01-30 22:06 UTC
There are several Linux solutions for dealing with MTP (the Arch wiki currently has 8 different solutions listed on its MTP page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mtp ), but unfortunately, my experience with them all with my Galaxy S4 was quite poor. They kept dropping the connection, and for some reason, they kept connecting to the wrong drive (I’d tell them to connect to the external SD card, and they’d claim that they did, but they were actually interacting with the internal SD card), thought maybe that’s an issue specific to my phone.
In the end, I found it much easier to install an FTP server on my phone than deal with MTP (since unlike MTP, it actually worked), but my final solution was to use bittorrent sync so that I could manipulate files on my desktop and have the ones on the phone update automatically (not to mention, you get a backup of the phone’s data that way).
So, while it might have something to do with my specific phone, I have nothing but bad things to say about MTP, and I sorely miss how I could mount my phone as a USB drive on older versions of Android. Though bittorrent sync is a pretty cool solution, since it allows me to manipulate files on my desktop without even plugging my phone into anything.
Any remote filesystem can work through WiFi as well, so there is no need to plug anything in the USB.
I really wish that USB would adopt OBEX for its non-block based file transfer. Works like a charm across Bluetooth.
Good review. Here’s my two cents.
The code on the box has a //TODO comment near the top edge. I think its fitting for a product that is essentially a very good beta.
The stock browser’s navigation bar seems jump up when you scroll down, but there may be more complex logic there.
I still have my wimax n810, as well as the ordinary one (the orange-black theme works well with my harley).
But you missed the best phone ever made – the N950 which is the N9 plus real keyboard.
Onscreen keyboards suck. Even for tablets. Either you will hit the wrong key or they take up so much space that you have fewer pixels than the original Palm left over.
You forgot the main reason why on-screen keyboards suck: you can’t rest your fingers on the them, feeling your way to the right key. There’s no tactile guidance, only a feedback that says, essentially: “Haha! You just touched a key! (You dumb fuck.)” Some people consider touchscreen keyboards the future.
Something like the pressure sensor Microsoft have on one of their surface keyboards, combined with some advancements in tactile feedback (variable texture by way of electrical fields or vibrations perhaps), may provide a future for onscreen keyboards.
But the keyboard issue is why i am keeping and eye out for someone taking the “second half” concept further.
Another option would be for someone to come up with a generic clip on bluetooth keyboard.
Nice review, now I want to buy this phone even more. I have an off-topic comment though – the text renders in wrong encoding for me. I’ve checked the page source, and it specificly sets ISO8859-1 via <meta> tag. Provided that all material from OSNews is encoded with UTF-8, may this tag be eliminated, or at least right encoding be set?
Nice article, but there’s one thing in it that gets on my nerves:
I see this happen in articles all around the web, and that’s that for some reason, technically minded journalists seem happy to quote battery capacity using mili-amp-hours. Amp-hours are not a measure of capacity, unless you also quote the voltage that this is delivered at. Use watt-hours (or joules for extra scientific street cred).
For instance, the Nissan Leaf’s battery is ~60Ah – does that mean that it is only ~30x the capacity of the battery on Jolla’s smartphone (~2Ah)? Hell no. Your average phone battery runs at roughly 3.6V, whereas the Leaf battery runs at 360V, so the actual difference in capacity is around 3000x!
Stop quoting meaningless numbers and trying to make points off of them. The conclusions you drew in that quote above are entirely unsupported by the numbers you provided.
Energy is measured in joules, electron volts, calories or watt-hours.
Electrical energy is measured in watt-hours. Ampere-hours are meaningless when it comes to energy.
I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to write this excellent review. Now I really, really want a Jolla! But how could I ever part with my N9! Oh how we are blessed by the riches of choice available to us in this time.
Good read, Thom… but it’s ‘elusive’ not ‘illusive’.
Also 770 isn’t part of the N-series so it’s just Nokia 770.
Good review, I really hope it takes off. I’m sorry I don’t have the spare cash to get one, but I might consider it for my next smartphone in a year or two if things keep improving on the software side.
Thanks Thom because your pretty good review.
I want a Jolla phone now!
Thanks Thom for your great review, your words describe exaclty my feelings using Jolla.
I just installed the January upgrade and it fixes some issues you described, especially with the browser and landscape gestures among other things that I still have to test.
I didn’t use much Android apps because there are some very good native alternatives nowadays, but my experience isn’t as bad as you describe it, in fact, I didn’t remember any big issues. I think the Android support improved a lot with the last December update.
Android apps work fine, in most cases. Good enough but they do so on Android phones too. Not a selling point and not why people buy in I think. Its just nice, an extra that allows to bypass any concern that required app X does not exist for that device. Still, Android apps miss what all the native ones have. Like ambience, pulley, following design and workflow concepts. Being part of the whole OS rather then something that just runs there. I think thats his point. He, like many of us, like that smartphone for its refreshing look and feel and Android apps do not follow there, are counter-productive from that angle of view. Still very useful for app X and great to have it when needed.
Edited 2014-02-01 09:38 UTC
When I saw sailfish presentations it reminded me BB10 which I am using right now. It also uses swipes only. Though, sailfish probably has more swipes when bb10 and you need more time to accustomize to them. I eager to try it but currently it is difficult to buy jolla phone for me. And I have my z10 for a less than a year. So probably I’ll try to switch to sailfish only after a year or maybe even later.
I had to register a new account just to share my thoughts.
I have to disagree on stability. Jolla has been the most stable phone i have ever used(samsung, nexus, iphone, nokia…). In the two weeks since getting my Jolla I’ve had exactly 0 crashes.
Keyboard is way better then both iphone and android. I just seem to hit the right keys most of the time.
The stock browser does need a lot of work, tabs not working is a huge problem. Minor bugs like not being able to scroll this commenting textbox is frustrating. Landscape browsing has been fixed in the latest update.
Over all Jolla has been a joy to use. Obviously the software is not as mature as other oses out there but the potential is enormous.
This is a classic Thom article, and is exactly what keeps me subscribing to the OS News’ RSS feed. Perfect balance between Thom’s slightly blunt, sarcastic style, and incredibly insightful, well researched information. The back story, the details, everything. Although the editing could be a bit better ( i noticed a form instead of from, and a few other small things ), apart from that modern tech journalism could learn from articles like this. Thanks Thom!