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Jolla Announces First Meego Phone Available By End 2013
x_IamSpartacus_x writes "Jolla, the Finnish company that continued Nokia's work on the MeeGo mobile platform, announced details of its first smartphone on Monday. Availability for the Jolla device is expected by year end and can be pre-ordered now; the phone will be priced at no more than €399 (US $512.26). The Jolla hardware looks similar to that of Nokia's Lumia, with a clean, button-less front face that houses the 4.5-inch touchcscreen. The phone will use a dual-core processor and support 4G LTE in some regions. Internal storage tops out at 16 GB, but can be expanded via microSD card. The phone also includes an 8 megapixel rear camera with auto focus. The phone is also 'Android app compliant' which, in a move similar to that of BlackBerry, can help with available apps at launch."
The maemo/meego devices have given users root access out of the box, perhaps you have to take one minor step to indicate you know what that means, but that's about all. These devices are there for you, and don't really try to protect themselves from their users/owners. I haven't seen the sources for sailfish yet, but I gather many of the people at Jolla didn't like the portions of the os that were shipped binary only while they were at nokia. So I'd expect the openness to improve. From the sdk, it looks like they are continuing to use X11, so that means that pretty much any generic arm friendly linux application should run without porting (though there are pleanty of good reasons to specialise/port). For maemo devices, that meant there was just one simple package to install to add a debian chrooted enviroment, which of course gives access to the full debian arm repos.
Replacable batteries.
It looks like they have taken an interesting step following that philosophy with enabling functional expansion through interchangable backs.
Sailfish also has a pretty slick interface. I will hold off on judgement until I get a chance to use it for a while.
If a user-centric design philosophy (including openness/freedom) doesn't really matter to you, and you don't care about the user interface, yes it's just another phone. But then again, any modern cell phone is essentiall Turing-complete and you can build/connect accessories and power supplies around them. So at a high level of abstraction, no modern phone is distinguishable, nor should we expect to see one any time soon.