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MeeGo Startup Jolla Signs Phone Deal
chill writes "Mobile company Jolla, which is continuing development of Linux-based mobile OS Meego, signed its first sales deal today, with D.Phone, China's largest smartphone retail chain. Jolla has not released details about its first product, which is expected to be revealed later this year. The company has not yet received access to any Nokia patents."
When they decide to put countries like China on the backburner and start making things like this available in more conventional markets, this might be an improvement. Otherwise, it's just the N9 situation all over again.
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Hopefully they'll have a model with modern hardware specs, matching the the best Android and Apple phones.
If their best model sports some 320x400 resolution and 3 generation old graphics hardware, it'll be a non-starter with a lot of ppl. If it can compete toe to toe, then I'll consider buying one. Let's say something comparable to the Galaxy S3: 1280x720 pixel screen, one microSD slot, a modern GPU, multi-touch, good GPS, and so on. Be actually competitive, and I'll give it a shot. Ship 3 gen old hardware, and sorry, no dice.
If you're a startup I don't see how it's a mistake. From TFA: "China was selected because it is the largest, most rapidly expanding smartphone market in the world, according to Jolla Chairman Antti Saarnio." This seems like a logical first step to me. Get established there first, then move on to more expensive markets once you are established.
I'm a little out of the loop on MeeGo development, but with the recent patent trolling and Microsoft loving from Nokia what makes Jolla think that even previous MeeGo agreements will be honored? If they are even enforceable Nokia has chosen a side in the free vs non-free, and just like any sinking ship honesty and goodwill are the first to go. It's not like a major corporation has ever crushed a smaller one just to be mean... Elop is did learn from the best on that one.
When it is made for the First World markets first - the quality does not decrease and it generally does well. These phones are made with the First World audience in mind.
When it is made with the Third World in mind, quality suffers. What the First World gets is largely a defective product with no thought or attention to the First World user aside from the poor quality translation of a manual in GB2312.
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Unlike the First-World focused N900 and N9, hardware will be cut down to appease the Third World market - and be a non-starter with the real target market, the First World.
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Because they are 2 separate markets. Has there really been anything that has started in China and made it big in Europe/North America? I really can't think of anything. Sure, there's been stuff that's been Korean and Japanese and sold quite well, but the Japanese and Korean markets are much different than the Chinese market.
I don't think it's its an accident that we drive Toyotas and not Cherys. Nor why we go on Facebook and not Renren.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Exactly. The problem with Nokia is ever since they've been making decent phones there's no easy way to get them. When most people go shopping for a phone, they don't go online to buy a phone and then get the SIM card, they go to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or the T-Mobile store and get the phone there on contract. If your phone isn't in there, its not going to sell in the US plain and simple. The last time I was in one of those stores, I found exactly 1 Nokia phone and it was a Lumia.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Now that Meego isn't beholden to corporate constraints on technology used, is there any plan to go back to the deb packaging system used in Maemo or are the developers sticking with rpm? It would probably be nice for developers if the phone ran a Meego user interface on top of a standard debian core.
They don't have the patents to release it in the US or most of the rest of the First World.
Companies with key patents to smart phones can't even avoid import bans and I would bet they infringe on a lot Nokia patents that they developed.
The N9 did not get into the US because MS did not want it beating their OS.
Given the plethora of cut-down devices and knockoffs, quality will suffer if they target the low-quality market that doesn't matter.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Despite that, the N9 has outsold the entire Whorephone platform.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Has there really been anything that has started in China and made it big in Europe/North America? I really can't think of anything. Sure, there's been stuff that's been Korean and Japanese and sold quite well, but the Japanese and Korean markets are much different than the Chinese market.
They might not be as successful as their Japanese counterparts, but from the top of my head Huawei, Lenovo and Haier are chinese.
Some time ago Japan was today's China, they were just copying and improving upon others designs, and they were regarded as lower quality products. Now they are leading in the automobile industry, electronics, and pretty much everything.
I think the same kind of evolution is possible in China in the next few years. The only thing they are lacking is the ethics and values, but maybe its not necessary.
If you're a startup I don't see how it's a mistake. From TFA: "China was selected because it is the largest, most rapidly expanding smartphone market in the world, according to Jolla Chairman Antti Saarnio." This seems like a logical first step to me. Get established there first, then move on to more expensive markets once you are established.
Supplementary: if Nokia decides to use their patent war chest to attack it, they'll still have the Chinese market (which is also the producing one, thus wouldn't care too much about Nokia's patent). If they start in the Western world, they'd be hang high and dry in no time if a patent war is started against them.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Look back to the USA of Edison's day and you'll see how ethics and values were rarely allowed to get in the way of a sale.
Invented by Jar-Jar?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
China is the very place where technology gets stolen if introduced by anyone else.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Lenovo was the division of a US company allowed to make the mistake - of national security - of selling to the Chinese government. That can't really be called Chinese.
I think the same kind of evolution is possible in China in the next few years. The only thing they are lacking is the ethics and values, but maybe its not necessary.
The only kind of evolution is in how they steal technology from the First World or to punish their own. Everything else is stolen.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Apparently you have forgotten about how the N900 and N9 have sold, where the latter outdid the whorephones combined. Salespeople were complaining that they couldn't move the Lumia devices while they could move plenty of N9's if they could stock them
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
While it may feature no user interface of its own, since Mer is Qt based and so is the KDE family of user interfaces, this phone could use Plasma Active or a mobile version of Razor-qt as its interface
The China-first strategy seems brilliant to me. Far more price sensitive, which plays to their strength.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
... Has there really been anything that has started in China and made it big in Europe/North America?
OK, How about silk, paper, gun powder, fireworks and bazillion other things chinese had ages before west heard of them?
or was it 'High Tech, Low Life' ?
The problem with Nokia in the US was they failed to engage the carriers, which, unfortunately, is a requirement to sell phones in the backwards US phone market.
Moreover, "improvement" for you, or for Jolla. They're in this to make money. If they can sell in the largest market in the world, why would they care about a monopolistic/oligopolistic market like the US?
They're trying to do new and cool stuff, not necessarily the same as what American Telephone & Telegraph wants.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Not understanding your comment about the N9 - only place I know of anyone having bought it is the USA; What was the mistake you're refering to?
As an N9 owner it's been a shame to see a great phone not achieve it's potential. I wish them luck, but I can't get excited about this just yet. Without the N9's excellent swipe UI MeeGo could just turn out to be yet another plain phone. The swipe UI, which seems to be what a lot of people seem to be mistaking for "MeeGo" is actually Nokia's own proprietary UI. The N9 is not straight pure MeeGo, any future products are unlikely to resemble the N9.
Unfortunately I can't help but be reminded of the Amiga's dying days when it seemed to be getting passed from one owner to another with promises of future models and the community eagerly believing in that news...and then nothing ever showing up. I'd like to see some diversification of the Apple/Android split of the smartphone market, but I'll only believe it when I see it.
China takes all open technology and gets the production costs lower and the volume up. This is not stealing, it is innovation in the production-part of the economy. Without the innovation at the plants producing stuff, there will be no ways of getting the volume up and the prices lower. That China makes stuff generic really fast, is really good for innovation. China is a part of an ecosystem. It's not only the heads of corporations, or the R&D departments that innovate. All the parts of the supplier-chain has to innovate, from the refining of raw-materials, marketing, production, finance and more. It's not stealing. It is called collaborating. Using open tech is not stealing.
The world doesn't need another mobile OS, it doesn't matter how good it is.. and by all account MeeGo is pretty good. iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, WebOS, Bada, Tizen, Symbian, OPhone, Firefox OS.. the list goes on and on. Apart from the Google/Apple duopoly, everyone else is jus fighting over scraps..
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They know where the thing sold.
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n9-3398.php
Same guys. They know what they're doing.
There isn't any data to support that, so it's most likely untrue. Still, it's the kind of anti-MS bullshit that gets you a cheap +1, insightful from the fanboy mods around here.
WP has crappy multitasking, and all your data are belong to Microsoft.
With IOS all your data are belong to Apple. And everything is controller by Apple.
With Android all your data are belong to Google, and performance is bad.
With Symbian the user owns his data, but performance is bad, sw development is really pain, and UI is bad. RIP.
What is needed is operating system that allows the user to own his data, has good performance, and allows the user to use the device the way he wants.
Meego/Mer gives this.
I hope so. Low-end clones are what saved the PC, so maybe it can save mobiles too. If China is the last bastion of technical progress and business, then we should all be grateful that we have a China to use.
The main problem with mobiles is that the OSes suck. The hardware that you buy, determines the shitty OS that you have to use, but is otherwise fairly generic and boring. And it's all soon going to cross the overkill boundary for most people, just like desktops did, if it hasn't already. (IMHO battery life is pretty much the only thing about smartphone hardware which is still really awful -- they haven't caught up to dumbphones just yet. Maybe some day.)
I understand if you are willing to pay more for the latest and greatest hardware, just as I know the Core i7 market has some damn good reasons for existing. I'm not even going to accuse you of compensating for a small dick, because I know some people really do ask their computers to work harder than others. If good hardware is available to you, though, it'll be because the same factories are churning out optimum-bang/buck devices in serious quantities.
BTW, low-end clones might also save us from our ISPs. There's little reason a ludicrously powerful (by 2010 standards) no contract smartphone shouldn't be available for under $100 at this point. Tablets are already there, and they're both more and less expensive to make (it's complicated). All those carriers who are "competing" by bundling their services with expensive phones -- oh, I can wait to see their asses handed to them. That is going to be glorious to behold. I hope every AT&T stockholder loses their shirt.
When introducing names of products or companies in articles, if the pronunciation might be ambiguous... such as Jolla. Is that a hard "J" like 'judge', and an "ll" like the "ll" in 'ball'? Or is Spanish pronunciation supposed to be used, in which case it should be pronounced "hoy'ya". If you say something about "dg'all-a" will someone laugh and tell you, "no, it's "hoy'ya"? If you say "hoy'ya" will someone insist it's "dg'all-a"? I shouldn't have to dig around to figure out how to pronounce made-up names of things, just TELL ME!
A good example of someone who does it right is the Pur water filter folks. Everywhere their name is written, a bar indicating the "u" is long appears there between the P and the r, indicating it should be pronounced as though it is the word "pure". Why can't the Jolla people do that? WHICH IS IT!?!
Given that the patent & regulatory issues are already being accounted for, there's no blocking issue unique to the US.
This will end up being some sort of piece of relabeled junk with a poorly translated manual for being targeted to China first. With a First World focus, it would be a product more in line with the wants of the First World - the only market that matters.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As a N770, N810 Wimax, and N900 owner(twice over), this would be a step down from the N9. Even the N9 itself is a large step down from the do-everything-go-anywhere N900 that represented the peak of what Nokia did with that platform. Despite that, that is what you get when you have a First World focus on hardware design.
Given that there is an existing tablet that has gone down this road(Zenithink C71) and uses cut-down hardware, there is precedent. That is the class of hardware that Jolla will come up with when they do release a product - older generation, strictly low-end hardware wrapped around a shoddy frame.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Try using an excuse that isn't a standard Apple handwave.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.