Miscellaneous notes and issues
There are a number of issues with Sailfish which I decided to lump together in a separate section, since I’m pretty sure they are either bugs or simply features not yet implemented. In addition, I also want to highlight some random things that stood out to me while using Sailfish.
First and foremost, my biggest issue is that Sailfish does not (yet) allow for changing the default applications for file types or URIs. So, links are always opened in the limited default browser, instead of the more advanced (landscape mode – the next issue I will cover) third-party Webcat browser, links to Tweets or Facebook will open the web versions of these services instead of the native Sailfish applications, and so on. This is frustrating, and definitely atop my list of issues with the platform as it currently stands. I’m pretty sure people with low-level knowledge of Linux and Mer can change default applications, but it really needs a proper front-end and user exposure.
The second biggest issue is the almost complete lack of landscape support. Save for a few exceptions like the photo application and the camera, there’s no landscape support to be found anywhere, and third party applications that do have landscape mode make clear why: landscape mode is incomplete. Take landscape mode in the WebCat browser – the moment you tap the URL bar to enter an address in landscape mode, a section of the screen disappears.
The first big feature update in 2014 – due to arrive any moment as of writing – reportedly will bring landscape mode to several applications, but for now, you’ll be stuck with portrait mode. My guess is that adapting Sailfish’ gestures to landscape mode is not a simple thing, and as such, they decided to postpone it beyond the shipping date. Understandable, but in the meantime, it’s still a huge miss.
Speaking of the browser – if there’s one application that I’m not happy with it’s the browser. I already mentioned the lack of landscape support, but there’s also an issue with how it handles background tabs. Background tabs are not kept in memory; instead, they are closed every time you switch away from one, and reloaded once you switch back. This means that if you are, say, writing a comment at OSNews, only to check another website to make sure your claims are accurate (*), you’ll lose the contents of your comment. This is done for memory reasons, but it’s just downright annoying and archaic.
A smaller issue is that I have no idea how to actually make the URL bar pop up. I just randomly jiggle the webpage around a bit to make it appear, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the way to do it. I tried tapping, swiping up, down, left, right, I tried invoking the powers of the Magic Unicorn, but nothing seems to consistently work. A small issue, but combine it with the lack of landscape mode and the sub-par tab management, and you arrive at a browser that’s just not very pleasant to use.
Luckily, it didn’t take long for a third party browser to arrive – the aforementioned Webcat – which addresses many of the issues with the native browser by adding landscape support and allowing background tabs to stay resident, among other things. In addition, Webcat is based on WebKit, whereas the default browser uses Gecko. These days that’s almost a distinction without a difference, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless.
I’m also not a huge fan of the keyboard – like the pulley menu, it seems to be overly sensitive, and especially compared to the delightful keyboard of Harmattan on the N9, it’s a huge step backwards. It’s also got a weird bug – if you’re a typing a word, and delete a single letter, word completion will start over, ignoring the first few letters you’ve already typed. You also cannot select misspelled words to fix them afterwards.
The amount of bugs I ran into while using Sailfish is surprisingly small; only two recur often enough to warrant mention. First, wifi connection will randomly drop several times a day, with connection re-establishing itself after a few seconds. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it didn’t also tend to lock up the user interface for a few seconds. This could be an issue specific to my wireless setup, but considering I’ve seen it while connected to other wireless networks as well, I’m pretty sure it’s a Sailfish-specific bug.
The second bug I run into a few times per week is what I can only describe as a total user interface crash – sometimes, the screen will turn dark for a few seconds, after which the UI loads up as if you freshly booted up the device. All your applications will be closed as well. This seems to be quite random, so I’m not really sure what causes it.
With the bad notes out of the way, there are also a few fun little things to mention. Deleting something in Jolla is done in a rather innovative way. Say you tap and hold an email and select the delete option. Instead of the email being deleted immediately, the email itself turns into reverse progress bar with a countdown timer; if you tap the email again within five seconds, the deleting is cancelled. This little trick is used throughout the operating system.
Animations and sounds are used relatively sparingly in Sailfish, so you won’t be bothered by stuff swooshing all over the place all the time. Peeking, for instance, is achieved through transparency, instead of the sliding animation that Harmattan uses.
Not a huge surprise, but still worth noting: you don’t need any special software to manage your device from a computer. Plug the USB cable in, and it’ll be mounted as a regular USB drive. You can drag and drop your stuff to it just like you can to any other USB drive.
Conclusion
You can leave it all behind and sail to Lahaina
Few devices have a history as complicated as the Jolla and Sailfish. The ten-year journey from the Nokia N770 to the Jolla was long, arduous, filled with focus shifts, mergers, and other complications. Like the nameless protagonist in The Last Resort, in order to step out of the shadows of the old world, Jolla had to leave Providence behind, traverse the Great Divide, cross the Rockies to reach the Malibu, and set sail across the Pacific to end up on the pearly white beaches of Lahaina.
However, also just like the nameless protagonist, they found that the natural beauty of Lahaina had already been framed and plasticised by hotel chains and fast food restaurants. It is in that environment that Jolla must make a stand and survive – because there’s no more new frontier.
The question now is if Jolla will be able to do just that. I think the answer depends on how you frame said question.
The cold and harsh truth is that if you distance yourself from what Jolla and Sailfish stand for, and compare them to the competition, there can really be no doubt about it: Android, iOS, and even Windows Phone will provide a more complete experience at a lower price than Jolla can currently offer. If you’re on a tight budget and don’t feel particularly strongly about the ideals of Jolla, you’re better off buying a device with a more established platform. This answer will surprise none of you.
Still, despite the above, Jolla has done something only a few (very large) companies have managed to do: make a complete smartphone, including hardware and software, that is both compelling and promising. Mozilla hasn’t managed to do that yet. Canonical has, so far, failed miserably. BlackBerry is crashing and burning. Nokia had to sell its failing devices division. In the Android world, only a few companies are making a decent profit. iOS is iOS.
This is a very harsh world, and being able to stand out in a truly compelling way between the hotel chains and fast food restaurants of the smartphone world is a huge achievement in and of itself – it’s just that the compelling nature of Jolla is not something you can summarise in review scores, quantify with benchmarks, or illustrate with a huge number of applications. It’s something intangible – something you either understand in a heartbeat, or something you won’t understand in a lifetime.
If you belong to the latter group, Jolla is not for you. If you belong to the former group, however, you can safely order your Jolla. You won’t be disappointed. Like the N900 and N9 that came before it, this platform has a healthy future not because it’s backed by a huge company – but because it isn’t.
In the meantime, Sailfish has become my mobile operating system of choice, and I have zero desire to back to Android.
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!