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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."
As a developer, I'd find an alternative to Java/Dalvik and Objective-C/iOS pretty appealing.
Meego uses X windows, and other more traditional technologies than android, is just as fast if not faster, and works like 'standard linux' out of the box. That's kinda nice, eh?
Just found this quote by Mark Dillon the software director. Essentially anyone can create a cover (the tools are open):
“Of course we will be offering a choice of Other Halves for the user to buy but this is a place where we want to see others get involved. Designers can design Other Halves for the device, engineers or hackers or techies can design new interfaces and maybe add physical hardware features that they wish they had on their device but might have a smaller market than to deserve having a whole entire device,” he said. “We talked about 3D printing them today. So it could be those kinds of things, but really we’re offering a new kind of interface for a device so that people can really take their imagination, and I believe there will be a lot of third parties and a lot of people who have a lot of great ideas in order to help you use the Other Half of the Jolla device.”
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.
"They are all one app at a time with background services."
Bullshit:
-Apps can multitask without Services, just use Threads.
-Android has multiple window support.
You are confusing the UI thread being stopped (when it is not visible) with threading/multitasking. Evidence of apps multitasking is for example a Samsung Note2 with multi-window support, although for some reason in the Samsung ROM you only can use some blessed apps multiwindowed, custom ROMs unlock this for app installed apps.
Using Services give extra features/hints to the OS. Like auto(re)start. It also gives a simple way to detach the UI from lightweight background tasks.