Down in the crowded bars out for a good time
Can’t wait to tell you all what it’s like up there.
Few devices advertise so elegantly which audience they target. When you open the shipping packaging of the Jolla phone and take a look at the phone’s box, you’ll be greeted by a plain white box, with an engraved silvery Jolla logo. The logo is surrounded by text – but upon closer inspection, you notice it’s not just text; it’s code. Right there on the box, you can find part of Sailfish Silica‘s code. Even before you open the box, the tone has been set.
This continues when you browse through the photos and videos that are stored on the device. Photos and videos from Jolla’s employees, which (of course) convey an atmosphere of community, fun, and adventure – not at all unlike the stories about the early days at the technology giants of today. Obviously, they don’t show pictures of stressed-out, overworked programmers in a total state of panic over a bug a day before shipping – but hey, we’ll cut them some slack.
Together, the code on the box and the photos and videos on the device make it clear that this device is not targeted at the ‘average’ iOS or Android user – if such a user even exists – but at early adopters, willing to, and perhaps even longing to, try something different. The Sailfish operating system is labelled as beta, further confirming what we already know.
Now that we’re in the proper mindset, expectations set accordingly, it’s time to actually look at the phone and its new operating system.
Jolla phone
Now that the industry has settled on slabs when it comes to smartphone design – whether we like it or not – it’s become increasingly difficult for smartphone manufacturers to differentiate themselves. Especially the fronts of phones, the part we look at most, are virtually all the same. Given this limited room to manoeuvre, it’s surprising that Jolla’s designers have managed to create a pretty unique device.
The Jolla device consists of two halves stuck together. The front halve – where the display sits – is relatively generic. It’s made out of a metal shell and a glass display embedded in a plastic ring. There’s quite a bit of bezel here, which makes the phone appear larger than its 4.5″ display implies. In addition, the front of the device looks a bit cluttered due to the thin plastic ring separating the glass from the metal shell. It’s a far cry from the cleanliness of the N9, or even the edge-to-edge nature of many modern smartphones. Perhaps the engineers opted for this construction because it’s simpler and cheaper. The long sides of the front halve are rounded, while the top and bottom are flat.
The back halve of the phone – The Other Half, in official parlance – is where the more interesting things happen. It snaps onto the front halve and can thus be removed, providing access to the removable battery, SIM slot and the MicroSD slot. The long sides of the backplate are flat, while the top and bottom are rounded – the exact opposite of the front halve. The backplate will eventually be available in a whole slew of colours, but for now, you’ll have to settle for white, while us early adopters also received a limited edition backplate in an orange-red colour, with “The First One” written on it. The orange-red colour is very striking.
Unlike the front, the back is about as clean as a phone can get. There’s no cheesy fake-metal ring around the camera (the only blemish on the N9’s design), no bulges or ‘designer lines’ – it’s almost completely flat, edge-to-edge, and only tapers ever so slightly to the sides, but this effect is so subtle it takes effort to notice it. It’s made out of plastic, but not the cheap-feeling slithery kind you find on Samsung’s devices; it more closely resembles the slightly sanded-down plastic of the Find 5 or the quality stuff that Nokia uses for its Lumias. It’s pleasant to the touch, in any case.
On virtually any other phone, that’s all you could possibly say about a backplate. On the Jolla, however, the backplate has another trick up its sleeve. On the back of the inside of the phone (so after you remove the backplate) you’ll find six tiny metal contact points that provide I²C so it can interact with the device’s hardware in interesting ways. People have already made hardware keyboards and added wireless charging to the device using this interface, highlighting the extensiveness of it. There’s a lot of potential here for both hobbyists and companies alike.
The two halves put together make the phone look like liquorice allsorts. The combination of the bright orange-red and the dual nature of the design really draws people in – when you pull this thing out of your pocket, people immediately get curious. A Galaxy or iPhone won’t raise any eyebrows; the Jolla will. For some strange reason, people familiar with Jolla almost always immediately try to pry off the backplate. Curious.
Like the N9, there are no front-facing buttons on the Jolla. There’s not even a brand mark on the front of the device, and the Jolla mark on the backplate has the same orange-red colour as the plate itself, just a tiny bit shinier, so that it’s barely noticeable. This lack of ostentatious branding is a small characteristic I find particularly classy. Its power and volume buttons are sandwiched between the two halves, as are the available ports (headphone jack and a micro-USB port). Two speaker grills are drilled out in the bottom of the front half, but since it only has one speaker, one of the two exists just for show.
All in all, the phone feels solid and sturdy, but it doesn’t have that rock-solid feel of an iPhone or the Find 5. To be honest, I never expected as such, either; this is the company’s first product, after all. Whether or not the phone is built to last I obviously cannot say, considering I’ve only owned it since early December 2013. For what it’s worth, I’ve not yet encountered any hardware-related issues or faults.
Specifications-wise, the Jolla is clearly a few generations behind what the competition has to offer. It’s got a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 dual-core 1.4GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. It has all the sensors and connectivity options you’d expect from a modern smartphone, including 4G LTE (which is, at the moment, not enabled in software though). Proving that specifications are just that – a bunch of meaningless numbers – the phone never seems to be short on power. Sailfish flies, but I’ll get to that later.
The display is 4.5″ in size with a resolution of 960×540. This is decidedly low-end by current standards, and to be honest, it shows – text and other objects are often rendered with fuzzy edges. Only a few short years ago, nobody would have batted an eye at this, but times change, and even the cheapest smartphones come with sharper displays than the Jolla does.
Furthermore, the display’s other aspects are not exactly stand-out either. I’m not a display specialist or anything, so I don’t know all the proper terminology, but Jolla’s display is a firm step back from the quite honestly insanely good display of my Find 5 (trust me – the Find 5 has the best display I’ve seen on any phone). It only bothered me the first week or so though, and now that I’m used to it, it’s no longer much of an issue. All you need to know is that the Jolla’s display will most likely be a step back from what you’re currently using.
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!