Jolla Goes For Debt Restructuring (phoronix.com)

jones_supa writes: Months after the smartphone company Jolla announced its split and intent to focus on Sailfish OS licensing, its financial situation has not improved. Jolla's latest financing round has been delayed and so they have had to file for debt restructuring in Finland. As part of that, the company is temporarily laying off a big part of its personnel (Google translation of Finnish original). Jolla co-founder Antti Saarnio said, "Our operating system Sailfish OS is in great shape currently and it is commercially ready. Unfortunately the development until this point has required quite a lot of time and money (PDF). To get out of this death valley we need to move from a development phase into a growth phase. At the same time we need to adapt our cost levels to the new situation. One of the main actions is to tailor the operating system to fit the needs of different clients. We have several major and smaller potential clients who are interested in using Sailfish OS in their projects."

Comments

I had a N9

[Ecuador]

I had a Nokia N900, a great linux-based phone, especially if you were an advanced user. Then I sacrificed the qwerty keyboard that I liked on the N900 and got a Nokia N9. To this day, I maintain that it was by far the best mobile phone UI I have ever used. Best feature was probably the app switching, so quick and easy to go from one app and the other and at the same time deciding whether the app you are leaving keeps running in the background or terminates. And the hardware and design was great as well. When I first got it, my wife tried it out with its beautiful Super Amoled curved display and told me "hey, next to your iPhone (a brand new 4S if I recall) this one looks like it is from 2030!". In fact when I switched to a Samsung Galaxy S3 (due to some apps I needed and were not available for Maemo/Meego), it was the first time ever I thought my new phone was (much) worse than the previous one. Right now I have an iPhone 6 plus and a Xiaomi Mi4 and I still miss that N9!
So, this was just a side note before saying thanks to the engineers who brought us what was the best mobile OS so far and it should have dominated the market, if only the marketing was as good as the actual product. When I first heard about Jolla I hoped I would be able to get another phone as good as the ol' N9 at some point, so I am sorry to hear about their struggles.

Re:I had a N9

[short]

I have N900 and for about a month LG G4 and I remained using N900. Without QWERTY it is unusable, to write TODO lists, notes, even to write URLs, those on-screen keyboards take forever to type together with many typos, and it is just inconvenient. When I need to do anything with the phone I SSH to N900 but I haven't yet found anything similar in Android. There are some chroot Linuxes but I could not get sshd running there. IIRC I got sshd working on Android itself but the shell is unusable there (or maybe I even did not get sshd working there, not sure now).

Re:I had a N9

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you wholeheartedly as I also owned a N900 (two in fact due to the poor soldering of the microUSB port). It really demonstrated that you could have a desktop in a small form factor that could also function as a phone back in 2000-2010 era using their maemo OS. I certainly think that Nokia at the time really messed up their mobile strategy as they had a stranglehold with Symbian. If they could have converted, the mobile OS landscape could have been quite different given how the N9 turned out.

Re:I had a N9The N900 was the best phone I ever ha

[Anonymous Coward]

And Maemo was *much* better than the shitty android I'm using now!
I had the same spreadsheet I've used on my desktop, similar editors, fantastic app switching, a browser that actually loaded website in the background windows (to this day I have to wayit when I switch tabs in android: yack!

In a word: it was fantastic!

I still miss it. The only thing better now is my wacom stylus: *much* better than the one in the N900 ;)