Jämsänjoki update fixes dozens of bugs reported by our community, adds many improvements and new corporate features, like mobile device management (MDM), new Camera user interface with quick access from Lock Screen, smarter Calendar on Events, WPA2 Enterprise PEAP support, new VPN options (PPTP, L2TP), Bluez version 5 for Jolla C and much more.
At some point, I need to write a retrospective of some sort about Sailfish OS. My Jolla Phone and Tablet are collecting dust in a closet somewhere, so I might as well put them to good use.
In any event, Jolla also unveiled something called Sailfish X, which is a ROM image of Sailfish for the Sony Xperia X. Interestingly enough, the ROM image isn’t free – it costs about €50 and requires a Linux PC to flash it onto the Xperia X you need to buy separately. Peculiar business model, but who knows – I’ve seen stranger things.
I could be a troll and say Black Phones Matter….
But why is it the black version sells on Amazon for 299 USD, but the white version sells for 393 USD? I’ve owned a white Note4 for years, and it’s terrible because every little mark on the case shows up way too well.
It’s like when the companies charge more for orange or pink or whatever colors. The terrible thing is it’s not their fault, it’s the people who will buy it.
Anyhow, if weren’t for other things going on, I would consider getting this just so I could run Sailfish OS on something… I tried getting the Tablet, but that went South… still waiting on the other half of my refund..
This is one of the reasons I keep my Nexus 4 around. She works great with the latest Android, but I like to try other OSes on it, since it’s so well supported. Time to pull LuneOS off and jam Sailfish back on to play with some more.
For a moment I thought this was a great idea. I am willing to pay 50 euro for a non-IOS non-Android experience on a phone.
But it looks like this business model will be still born:
1) it only works for an Xperia X and that being a specific model, not the Dual SIM variant or the Performance model. No other phones at all.
2) the current version of Sailfish doesn’t offer full
support for the phone, like Bluetooth functionality. And they aren’t guaranteeing it will work.
3) Quite a complex conversion to get it working.
In order to make this work, I think they need to support MANY more different phone models from the last 2 years and make sure the phone works well with SailOS (hardware functions like under Android). And an idea would be to buy up a couple of hundred 2nd hand phones and install Sailfish OS on them and sell them on Ebay, so the average user wouldn’t have to go through hoops.
I think the fact that they only announce one phone and even that phone doesn’t work 100% shows the problem with mobile phone hardware: every single model has it’s own hardware driver tree and that is how Qualcomm and MediaTek and other hardware companies keep the mobile phone world locked in: you can’t just install a different OS on a phone, like you can with a PC…
I upgraded my Jolla phone (the first model) last night. I had to restart the phone as the backup process (before upgrade) hung, but the upgrade itself worked nicely.