Wireless Archive

The Jolla phone recently got its long-awaited keyboard 'other half', and Jolla Users just published a long video detailing this new addition to the Jolla family. The Other Half Keyboard, as it's officially called, was a Kickstarter project completed in someone's garage - figuratively speaking - and the video does indeed show that while clever, the product is a bit unwieldy and too large for my tastes. I do admire the whole project, though - it's quite something to build a product from nothing all the way to shipping to users, especially something as niche as this.

Realistically speaking, however, this is not the product for those of us looking for a modern smartphone with a real keyboard.

As Jolla hinted earlier this month, it announced the first Sailfish licensee at Mobile World Congress Asia as being Intex. Intex is claimed by Jolla to be India's second largest smartphone manufacturer, and manufactures in both India and China, and has a range of Android phones sold under the Aqua brand. The phone should appear by the end of the year.

Update: there's a denial, which in turn is also being questioned. Conclusion: nope, not happening.

Interesting, if not a bit of an odd decision. One has to wonder what prompted this decision, because even though I like Sailfish for what it represents, it's far from a true alternative to Android or iOS. Maybe Yota knows something about Sailfish 2.0 we don't?

I'm intrigued.

Buying a phone in combination with a contract - the mislabeled "free phone" - just became a whole lot more complicated in my home country of The Netherlands. Today, our minister of finance, Jeroen Dijsselbloem (if you follow international news - yes, that one) today announced that he is not going to create an exemption in Dutch finance laws specifically for mobile carriers offering "free" phones on contract.

Last year, The Hoge Raad der Nederlanden (our supreme court) ruled that if carriers offer a loan of €250 or higher, they need to abide by the same rules as any other company, institution, or entity providing such loans - meaning, they will have to perform an income check, check if people have prior debts, and in general, if their financial situation is sound enough for them to be able to take on a loan for a smartphone. They will also need to be a lot more transparent and upfront about the fact they are offering a loan, including warnings, the terms, and so on.

This, of course, affects carriers a great deal; a lot of expensive, high-end phones, like iPhones or the latest Galaxy phones, are sold in combination with contracts, their true price hidden in monthly payments. Making it harder for consumers to take on these loans hurts their business model. As such, carriers had asked our minister of finance to create an exemption specifically for them - but he refused.

Carriers are, of course, not happy. T-Mobile, Vodafone, and KPN - our three major carriers - have already voiced their displeasure. They're complaining they will have to do considerable investments to change their sales model, and that it will become a lot harder for customers to buy high-end phones. To be fair to the carriers, all this does mean consumers will have to reveal a considerable amount of private information to carriers if they want to take out a loan to buy a phone.

That being said, there are alternatives: carriers could simply charge the price of the phone upfront. This, of course, is not something they want - they'd much rather be a little bit shady and fuzzy about the true price of smartphones. Samsung, Apple, and other smartphone makers surely won't be happy with this either, as they rely on these somewhat shady deals to peddle their wares. Half of Dutch consumers are already on SIM-only contracts, and this will only push more consumers to cheaper phones.

As a Dutchman, I find this great news. My financial means are such that I don't have to worry about this sort of thing, but there are enough people out there for whom this is not the case, and there are certainly quite a few people lured into these seemingly "cheap" phones, only to suffer for it down the line. While I'm sure people living in Libertarian la-la-land will scream bloody murder, the fact of the matter is that if left to their own devices, these companies will abuse people left and right.

I already highlighted several of these Casio classics in my Moto 360 review, but The Verge does a nice job of listing them with beautiful photos.

Nice overview of the situation in Europe, but to be honest, I haven't seen any carrier-specific models in The Netherlands in years. In fact, at least on my carrier, you can unlock your phone the moment you get it (a low fee may be charged), and after 12 months, the unlock process is always free (at least for T-Mobile - I'm guessing the same applies to the other two carriers).

You can buy unlocked phones from major stores - both online and offline - everywhere, and nobody bats an eye. In fact, in the first quarter of 2014, almost half of all 'mobile connections' were SIM-only - i.e., the mobile phone contract is just the SIM card, without any "free" phone. When you do the maths, clever shopping for a SIM-only contract and an unlocked phone can be hundreds of euros cheaper in the total running time of the contract than going the traditional contract+phone route.

Coincidentally, I'm pretty sure this explains why Android is so popular here. You can get unlocked Android flagship-quality phones or last year's flagships for a few hundreds euros, whereas unlocked iPhones are two to three times as expensive. When you give consumers an honest breakdown of what a contract+phone really costs, most people will opt to save hundreds of euros.

Sailfish OS 1.1.6 has been released. The biggest new feature is probably the private browsing mode, but it's also got a host of other new features, bug fixes, and improvements. I would guess this is one of the last 1.x releases, since the tablet, whicvh ships with Sailfish OS 2.x, should be shipping this month.

Patel has a point - the rise of all these streaming music services has completely undone the end of DRM in the music industry. It's most likely entirely unrelated, but Steve Jobs' scathing letter condemning the use of DRM is no longer available on Apple's website - just as Apple is rumoured to launch its own streaming music service.

The same has happened in IM, chat, messaging, or whatever you want to call it. It's 2015, and I have five messaging applications on my smartphone - WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messenger, Hangouts, Skype - and I also use iMessage occasionally (on OS X) because some of my friends are locked into it and don't want to use something else. These companies - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook - are actively and consciously making the choice to make the lives of their customers as difficult as possible.

If these companies really cared about their customers - as they always claim they do - they would've come together and used or developed a proper open standard for messaging. Instead, we get Facebook (through WhatsApp) banning users for using 3rd party WhatsApp clients on Sailfish, or we have Apple making grandiose promises about turning FaceTime into an open standard, but then backtracking once they realise they can frustrate and lock-in consumers by keeping it closed. Google, meanwhile, seems to have no idea what it's doing at all, flipflopping left and right (Hangouts? Messenger? What's it going to be, Google?). Skype is Skype.

Now that iOS and Android (and to a lesser degree, Windows Phone) are entirely and wholly interchangeable, companies are looking for other ways to lock their consumers into their platforms - and much like in music, the companies are placing their own interests above that of their consumers.

A complete coincidence, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, to ensure the future usability of your Pebble device, it's highly suggested to switch to Android.

I don't really care much about the voice search and recognition stuff in Now, Siri, and Cortana - but this video demonstrating the capabilities of Hound - an alternative to those three for Android - is mind-blowing. The recognition speed, the talkback, the way it manages to get accurate results for even relatively vague and quite complex compound questions is amazing.

I smell an acquisition incoming.

I like it. It's functional and has a certain charm to it.

I can't read Russian or Finnish, so I can't get into the details here, It's supposedly part of a greater push by Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Sounds like good news for Sailfish.

Good news for Pebble and iOS users: Pebble has just posted on Reddit that it is working with Apple to make sure that rejections like this will no longer happen.

I get the Passport (still want one!), I get the Classic. I do not, however, get a generic BlackBerry phones that looks like any other default Android device - but with an operating system nobody (except people like me) is asking for.