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Ex-Nokia Staff To Build MeeGo-based Smartphones

Posted by timothy on from the hope-springs-eternal dept.

Snirt writes "A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for 'dinghy'), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities."

14 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Good luck by Tancred · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think it's too late due to the developer network effect (same goes for Firefox OS and even Windows Phone). But I'd like to be wrong about that.

    1. Re:Good luck by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But are there enough "Linux hackers" that would bother to buy the thing? After all we've seen that Linux hackers would rather have the Windows Tax break than buy from places like System76 as the Newegg article from a few weeks back showed, and Open Moko didn't sell enough to make it worth doing, so I'm seriously doubtful there are enough hackers that give a shit about their phone OS to actually make this worthwhile.

      After all if Linux hackers only bought from Linux vendors and bought open hardware we'd already have a market with such devices, but the fact that we don't leads me to believe there just isn't enough that care what runs on their phones. Hell without economy of scale on their side these things will probably be higher than a decent Android phone, not to mention I seriously doubt ANY carrier is gonna offer a hacker friendly phone on contract so it'll be full price city which averages $400-$600, at least around here. How many people are gonna pay that just to have a fully hackable phone? Raise of hands, how many here will be pre-ordering if they offer it?

      Sorry to be a downer but without a major OEM like Samsung or Nokia behind it I just don't see any of these niche phones going anywhere, and that goes for WebOS, MozOS, and WinPhone as well.

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      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    2. Re:Good luck by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The late Steve declared keyboards were bad, so every second-rate Jobs wannabe declared keyboards had to go.

      Nokia's last horizontal slider phone, I believe, was the E7 released in Feb 2011.

      RIM, for the time being, offers vertical sliders.

    3. Re:Good luck by davydagger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      nobody wants windows on a cellphone. People only use windows on the PC because they feel they are stuck with it.

      Partnering with microsoft was a terrible idea. Unless windows 8 phone is some total game changer, its all lost.

      They were much better sticking with maemo, because at least when you have GNU/linux, you have the monopoly on a solid niche. All of which are rabid fanatics who both shell out 10x money for a phone, only to turn around and do free work on it. When you have windows, you really don't have a base. The techies don't want it. The average user is comfortable with android, and the newbsauces, trendies have apple. Even corporate is going to apple, and there is nothing that windows phone does the iphone doesn't to counter this trend.

      As for microsoft, "windows" is a toxic brand. If I were any other company, I'd be hesitant in selling "windows" anything. If I were microsoft, I would call "windows phone" "xbox phone", as the xbox brand is far less hated. In fact, I'd discontinue the windows brand alltogether except for corporate, and just use the xbox name.

  2. Something tells me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... they would rather see you translate Jolla as "Lifeboat," rather than "Dinghy."

    1. Re:Something tells me... by furbearntrout · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Lifeboat" tells me that your project is the Titanic and the ship is sinking.

      Actually it's the the Lusitania, and it got torpedoed by Microsoft.

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      Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
  3. It is actually a good idea by miknix · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they start selling some phones, who else better than Nokia to buy the company?

  4. Re:How long until their market share exceeds Nokia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    By the time they get their MeeGo phones to market? Probably as soon as the first phone sells.

  5. You've got until... by Duncan+J+Murray · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...my unreplaceable one-of-a-kind Nokia N900 becomes irreparable, to come up with a phone worthy as its successor. It seems pretty solid, so I'll give you a few years. (fingers crossed)

    The mobile market definitely needs a full gnu/linux phone. In fact, the N900 follows on from a privileged few mobile devices with desktop-like capability - the psion 3a, psion 5mx, Nokia 9500 communicator, Nokia E90 (only just). And it was only really the Psions that didn't shy from giving you the full OS experience just because it was a mobile device. Why can't my mobile device have a full fledged file-manager with drag-and-drop capability or a desktop where I can place regularly used files as well as applications?

    But maybe I'm mad - apparently you don't need these things on the desktop either.

  6. Re:Could be the next Intel by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hey, if a few former Fairchild Semiconductor employees can form Intel and go on to take over the world, I don't see any reason to doubt a bunch of former Nokia employees could have a big impact on the cell phone market. Of course the odds of any startup just avoiding liquidation are very slim, so I don't recomend sinking money into them, but this is a very fast moving, immature market, so there's huge potental there.

    it's like the third offshoot from Nokia, that's aiming to make phones.

    Benefon actually made a lot of phones too(they were the first with tetris on a phone, first with t9, had dual sim phone ages ago and so forth), but their heyday went a decade ago.

    the question for this new venture is if they can scoop up enough money to actually produce the hw properly. there has been literally dozens of OS only producing companies which amounted to pretty much nothing.

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    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  7. Re:gtk+ and qt don't mix well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Writing apps in C and GTK? No thank you, that is way to complex for many simplish apps. I've written a Qt Quick / QML app recently for the N9. I honestly couldn't remember when it was the last time I had so much fun writing a GUI as with Qt Quick. Very easy, excellent data binding and spot-on for the task. It truly is perfect for those quick, heavily animated, finger friendly and asynchronous GUIs we've com to expect on mobiles. For the harder bits or more low-level system access the bridge with Qt / C++ is easy.

  8. Re:Wrong OS... by Microlith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    there's just no way to get MeeGo up to speed compared to Android, iOS and WP7 at this point API wise

    Since you're so familiar with the details, care explaining how? Some detail, if you would. I'm curious as to how Qt 5 and the rest of Mer (the MeeGo-type core Linux platform they're using) is deficient, API wise.

    Or is this yet another empty implication?

    They should have started with an OS that was not too far behind and also had a strong core following - WebOS.

    So they should have gone with an OS they were totally unfamiliar with, rather than one they were familiar with... why?

  9. Re:Change the god damned name first... by wmac1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.

    - a few of the developers decided to produce commercial versions and sell for money
    - a few others thought they need money for living and started developing new commercial projects with functionalists similar to the open source one but better (this category includes myself)
    - a few others just gave up on the project and left the source code somewhere hoping that someone else will continue developing it

    The reason might be the hard fact that you cannot work for free and pay for your life.

    This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)? ... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?

  10. Re:Change the god damned name first... by davydagger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    well consider its the successor to maemo, I'd say most of the nerds want one. Like they wanted maemo.

    Why? its a gnu/linux cellphone. Nerds like gnu/liunx. This is slashdot. News for nerds. I'm pretty sure that to the average slashdot reader, that something this nerdy is a very big deal. Especially after the whole nokia/microsoft debacle. Again, nerds are smart people and aren't driven off by silly things like labels and driven towards marketing campaigns. They are driven because its going to be easy to modify with a great community, which makes it more of a hobby than a cellphone. Being nerds, modifying cellphones is a very legitimate hobby. Again this is slashdot.

    Find your way back to gawker please.