To me this is way ahead of iOS/Android, the native browser sucks, and it requires some massaging to get everything running smoothly, but the UX is second to none. That fact well supported by how many features have been copied by Apple/Google over the years.
A question I ask rather here than on that old thread: Is it possible to attach a monitor, mouse and keyboard to a jolla phone with sailfish and run a linux desktop?
Nokia N900 was really great, Jolla has some of the former team people.
I only jumped into Android after my Symbian phone died, and by then Symbian Belle, with QT and PIPS (PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian OS), it was already shapping great.
"Burning the boats," in the form of getting rid of Jolla (and whatever happened to Meego) is one of those management aphorisms that needs to die. As it turns out, having an alternative to Windows phone would've been a better decision. No guarantee of success, but less of an irrecoverable failure at least. Where is that Elop guy now?
I'll say one good thing in hindsight about Elop. He's not all over the Epstein files like another MS executive of the era.
Edit: Wow, I tried to be discrete and not mention him by name but I notice every time I mention Steven Sinofsky was close to Epstein I get downvoted a lot here. Look at this one I found searching for "elop" for example: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA006576...
As long as they weren't under-age I could tolerate a couple of Russian prostitutes peeing on him in exchange for a commercially viable Nokia handset business.
Anyone with the means to travel to Epstein's private island had the means to travel to a place where prostitution is legal and do what you want with legitimacy. You only would have gone through him if you wanted someone trafficked. Age of the "prostitute" can only make association worse, never OK.
I think this person is joking. For one, they're mixing metaphors between Epstein and the rumored Trump pee tape, then tying it into Nokia where neither seems to apply.
I was indeed making light of a grim situation. Not only did the people in Epstein's web commit particularly heinous crimes, those crimes were subsequently used to gain influence over people with economic and national security responsibilities, in order to bend them to the priorities of foreign powers. I take all of that very seriously.
Nevertheless, apparently without any hidden agendas, Stephen Elop destroyed a legendary company and lost thousands of dedicated and competent people their jobs.
I'm not really sure how Epstein files are related to Elop making a malicious (some say, stupid, but I don't believe it) decision. But I'm gonna use this argument from now on, relevant or not.
– they dropped production
– at least they are not in Epstein files, like some other people
– they drove over speed limit!
- at least they are not in Epstein files
I thought the n900 did some things better than the n9. The biggest problem was lack of portrait mode. I didn't understand at the time why they didn't "just" tweak the n900 ui instead of rewriting everything.
But more importantly, we need an alternative to two big tech companies who are cranking the enshittification dial right up while also remaining under a particular country's laws.
What does full-stack mean here?
Phone is fully produced in Europe?
Software and online storage fully provided by European company?
edit: I want this phone, I have reserved a slot in the coming batch.
Just posing as an average Joe here, someone who does not host their own storage, calendar, contacts, phone tracking, remote wipe, the "free" features Google and Apple are known for on their phones.
Usually 'full stack' just means software. Here it means a true Linux phone (Sailfish OS) plus Android compatibility with sandboxing. The C2 model is made in Turkey from Asian parts. The new phone is manufactured in Asia, but the final assembly, QA, and software flashing are done in Finland.
This isn't for people with a consumer mindset. It’s for people who want a Linux computer in their pocket, more privacy, and still want to run some Android apps.
But even the full software stack isn't European as it runs on a Mediatek platform (ie. all the cellular stack and platform software is from Mediatek, which is from Taiwan). It's the apps software stack on top of the Linux kernel that is potentially "European".
There are no longer any cellular chipset vendors based in Europe, afaik, so there's really no alternative. It's also hard to see how they will ever again be one.
There are phones that can run "true Linux" out there, and there even are ports of Sailfish OS for some of them, but Jolla phones were never part of those and rely on Android drivers instead.
People also successfully use Librem 5 (which I happen to use), OnePlus 6, Pixel 3A and some others. There's not a lot to choose from, sure, but they do exist.
Let us clarify here as it is very different indeed.
The Jolla C2 Community Phone is done in collaboration with Reeder, who is the HW vendor. This means Reeder sources the components, plans the production and does the manufacturing in Turkey. Jolla provides the complete software stack (Sailfish OS) which is installed by Reeder in the manufacturing.
In the new Jolla Phone everything is different. Jolla is the vendor, has designed the product itself, done the component sourcing and pays directly to the component vendors. We control the pipeline. Further, we have secured our position for the initial memory batch with advance purchase.
Also, to be clear: Reeder has no involvement in the new Jolla Phone.
Thank you for asking, very good points to clarify!
It's both; the one I mentioned is for system drivers, the one you're talking about is for running applications (which you can also do on a regular non-Halium GNU/Linux using e.g. Waydroid).
I'm sure that if you tell Jolla about a relatively modern mobile SOC with mainline linux support, they'll look into it instead of relying on libhybris.
They can rely on libhybris if they want, why should I care - I just object to calling that "a full-stack alternative", especially when alternatives do exist.
That wasn't modern when they released it in 2020. Jolla chose a little more pragmatism for their hardware in the hope that they actually sell phones to other people than 100% open-source purists. I find it funny when dudes like you go all "well awkshwally" on them...
I use my Librem 5 as a daily driver, and I’m certainly not an open source purist.
What I do care about is that my phone isn’t going to run into obsolescence a few years down the road (due to hard kernel forks and YOLO’ed device drivers that are not going to be updated for newer kernels).
Battery: I unplugged it from the charger 10 hours ago, it's currently at 55%. Typically it's up to 22 hours when suspended, up to 12 hours when idling without suspend and about 3-5 hours of active use depending on what you're doing. Could be better, but can be worked with.
What I was trying to tell you with my original reply to you is that Jolla chose a different point on the free/pramatic curve of available SoCs. They selected a phone that's more likely to be used by average people rather than a fully open one. (You can still see in this very thread, complains about the high price for what it offers, showing they haven't fully succeeded, at that.)
Pointing out that they still rely on Android drivers for booting the thing is a little tone-deaf from my perspective when they're basically choosing a different path towards a similar goal to Purism and other alternative mobile vendors: higher availability of non Google, non Apple mobile devices. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that. And like I explained the reason for their choice is not nefarious but a pragmatic one.
And what I was trying to tell you is that they're free to choose whatever point on the curve they want and pursue that as long as they don't misrepresent what they're doing. What is "full-stack alternative" supposed to mean when it relies on the very thing it's supposed to be an alternative to? What is Purism's effort then, "even fuller-stack alternative"? Words have meanings.
> User configurable physical Privacy Switch - turn off your microphone, bluetooth, Android apps, or whatever you wish
The "whatever you wish" seems to indicate that this is a regular switch that can be configured to turn off certain functionality. Is that true?
I was hoping for a solution that physically disconnects the microphone/cameras/etc, or at least acts at some lower level than the OS. But if it's flexible and configurable then it sadly doesn't look as secure.
How would you have a user-configurable switch that physically disconnects things? The mechanism for that sounds complex. I'm not a hardware person, but I imagine you'd need to route the traces for each possible component to the switch and then have like a dip switch panel to control which behaviors are controlled by the switch. Either that or a software-controlled equivalent to a dip switch panel that can only be configured in the bootloader, otherwise the software-controlled physical disconnect would be no safer than a software disconnect.
Ah I think I understand what you're suggesting now. This hypothetical switch is both a physical and software disconnect. Some features like the camera would be physically disconnected by the switch and therefore would not be user-configurable but then some other features (for example, GPS) could additionally be software disconnected at the same time.
That seems like a neat idea, but IMO I wouldn't trust the software-controlled half of it, so I'd end up only using the non-configurable physical portion of it.
That makes sense but it's also just a guess. The quote above would be equally applicable to an entirely software option that is toggled with a physical switch rather than an option in a menu.
Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities. Most companies offer them only for iOS and Android.
If your smartphone can't run the vast majority of apps, it is basically dead on arrival. Nobody is going to buy it when they need to carry another phone anyways.
The only way around this is either emulation (which Google is trying very hard to sabotage) or heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms. I don't think either option is likely to work.
They don’t need to specifically support “niche platforms,” which will never happen anyway. They just need to support the one, universal platform every device (be it phone, laptop or desktop) can always access, the web.
And they don't want to, because that experiment ran for around 20 years and resoundingly failed. Turns out it's really hard to stop the bottom quintile of users from entering all their credentials into just about any website that looks similar to what they are used to - and then their identity/money is just gone.
Stopping those users without a trusted authority deciding which electron-wrapped websites are genuine is an unsolved problem, I think.
If the app truly just plumbed a webview and cert verification - which has been doable for over a decade - it would be very portable and this wouldn't be a problem.
The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.
> The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.
Both can be true. Many (most?) online banking apps are just shitty wrapped javascript, that also uses an awful lot of system APIs.
I'm using a couple of different banks, and not a single one has anything close to a native app. Because how nice would that be? Responsive interface (since it doesn't need to load every single view from the server), instant search over your transactions (since the DB can be cached locally), instant access to all the PDFs in your inbox... but no.
Maybe you don't live in any European country. 2FA with cell phone has become compulsory for most banking procedures in Spain, to the point that I can even no longer assist my parents without being present there with them. Even when there is a web app, this randomly forces the user to confirm identity via phone. Every day this extends to more and more official proceduress these days (e.g. loging to EU pages, regional government paperwork, access to hospital records and prescriptions...), and unfortunately it seems to me that the phone as official ID might be the future. In this scenario, projects like this one cannot be really useful without some standardization or layer that makes it acceptable by the government.
In two banks I was in in last 20 years before and after Payment Services Directive implementation, I was a secondary user to the account. I could do almost anything on the account which saved my mother lots of stress. It's enough for her to check balance and outgoing transactions and rest lies in my hands. Wouldn't that help you as well?
In Poland we have a rather well-functioning digital services platform. Tho, two weeks ago news outlets raised a small tantrum that our digital identity wallet application may be non-compliant with the upcoming EU standards. But as for now, once you log into the application (there are few ways - ID card with chip, 3rd party login by bank and so on), the session is kept for a year.
After that's done you can log on desktops by QR code or pass data from app to app.
mObywatel app tries to include all the essentials: from digital ID copy (identity confirm, validation for you and someone else) your DNI-equivalent protection (won't allow to process your personal information in some cases). There's healthcare services handling (prescriptions, but we also have a dedicated app), inbox/outbox for official matters, payments and taxes, section for car and vehicles (penalty points, accident reporting), environment (reporting accidents, air quality, flood alerts) and travel (rail tickets wallet, tips and warning for traveling destinations - atm it shows that Spain is on 4th level terrorist threat). Tbh, it's way better than used to be few years ago with complex login flow that could break midway.
It's all convenient stuff but older generations are already digitally marginalized and we may indeed head into the future where we won't be able to do anything without a smartphone, in both real and digital life.
Many banks restrict the number and capabilities of secondary users. In the end I had to get a power of attorney, but for me observing these changes is just a warning. I see a pervasive use of a phone as means of authentication and the compulsory nature of hardware-bound digital IDs is penetrating our society. That is a barrier for elderly people but also for other groups, specially when those requirements are not accompanied by standards (i.e. why does a French person need to get a new ID to work with Spanish bureaucracy) and also because the phone itself is an unsubsidized cost. Not to mention when one is travelling to countries with locked networks, losing the phone or, closer to the topic here,the lack of trust on generic phone platforms, which enforces a duopoly (Google Android + iOS) preventing new technologies to enter the market.
We actually moved to Europe a number of years ago, and have lived in two different countries here. In my experience, there's often alternatives for 2FA that they'll tell you about once they know that you do not own a phone.
Although I haven't held one in my hands, apparently there's Flutter support for Harmony OS. There are quite a lot of mobile apps implemented in Flutter and Dart, and platform support for alternative phone OSs looks doable.
The need to support apps - when you are constantly internet-connected anyhow - is becoming less and less important. You can now pin many websites to your phone’s “desktop” and have them run identically to native apps, and sometimes with even better start-up performance.
So long as a service is being provided identically on a mobile website as it is in a native app, you can pin that website and get just the same experience without needing a native app.
It's not a huge hassle to keep another phone around for these things, if you really want to have a Jolla phone.
Of course they cannot answer this in the FAQ, because they have no insight into how thousands of different banks and other third parties will make their decisions on which devices to allow.
That definitely seems to be the better alternative amongst all others. While I appreciate all the energy put into graphene or lineage it appears to me like way too much energy for Half baked solutions. Depending on google good will in the future too. I can understand them as hack, not that much as industrial proposals.
I think the EU in general is shortsighted if they don’t spend resources to complete what they already have for basic technology of their own: phone, telcom infra, AI models, cloud providers, etc.
I would say the same for global south. I am a US citizen, but the rest of the world is crazy to depend so much on US and China.
The phone looks good. I have looked at GrapheneOS, but not Jolla.
Great initiative but too big. Give me a 3.5" phone, under 100g with 2 weeks battery life, and we're in business!
Oh the joy, of being able to back it up with restic, integrate my email, text and script based workflows, and have total control of the ports and software that runs on the device. That would be amazing!
why stop at 2 weeks. why not ask for 2 months and 50g. and 3 usb c ports. all with full functionality. you might want to connect two monitors to your phone after all.
I invested in this. I am quite sick of the attitudes of some of the big american phone players.
This is coming from someone who has for the longest time been invested in Apple and the Apple Ecosystem. I adored the ease of integration of everything. The amazing synergy between their designers, and their engineers. I never really minded that things came later to the Apple Ecosystem. It just worked. And it was great.
But the golden statue, the absolute pathetic DMA attitude from Apple. It started to get to me. And I am trying to now get out of that Apple Ecosystem.
I don't think it'll be smooth. I think the process will be painful as I try to work around some of the limitations. No NFC payments will be my biggest painpoint as an ADHD addled man who forgets his wallet at least 3x a week. But it's worth trying. And it's worth supporting alternatives.
another adhd guy here.
I haven't tried it, so i can't vouch for it to any degree of certainty, but maybe it's an option to have your main payment card in a sleeve inside your phone case?
Even if it works, it's only a drop in the bucket, but maybe that's enough if you consider the lack of NFC payment a major issue.
thank you for pushing for an alternative to android and apple
Chat Control was nowhere near to become law. Last Fall, they would have voted about whether they really talk about it, but even that failed. Even if it would have been successful, nothing would have guaranteed that it becomes a law, or that it wouldn’t have been watered down completely. And the whole topic was kept alive somehow when it was well known even in September that the proposal was dead, because Germany doesn’t support it, and they didn’t have the necessary number of votes. Yet, there were articles even in November which stated that Germany decided only at that time that they don’t support it, which was obviously not true. It seemed to me like an artificial bubble of outrage. It was a bad proposal, so the outrage was needed until September. It’s just strange that people still pretend that it’s not dead half year after it became impossible to even consider it in the parliament.
Given that it has been struck down multiple times now, it's the minority of European Union members. Making a blanket statement of "Europe" (which btw is not the same as EU) is just insulting.
I noticed that the orders hasn't bumped up that much since this was shared last time. Not really sure I see the growth here is showing a lot of demand for a European smartphone - although I could totally be wrong given the geopolitical situation.
I guess this is a descendent of my 16 year old Nokia N900, and probably the best phone I had. It ran the Maemo operating system, and its UI was a forerunner to a lot of what is current. It also had a built in, full, terminal.
I'm deeply saddened that they didn't add a 3.5mm audio/headphone jack.
There was a community poll and I believe a headphone jack was the second-most requested feature after a MicroSD slot.
I appreciate they have to draw a line under the feature set somewhere, however the cost of an audio jack is literal pennies and I'm quite sure the PCB designers could have squeezed it in somewhere.
As someone who has no interest in wireless accessories it makes me unwilling to buy the phone.
This works wonderfully in quiet environments. But the moment you have any significant background noise, and need noise-cancelling headphones, this ends up being useless because no headsets do noise cancelling over a headphone jack - only internal batteries or USB connectivity.
Even with those rare wired-optional headsets that accept headphone cords, the noise cancelling functionality gets shut off the moment you plug the headphone jack in.
100s of donors were stiffed of greater than half the money they put into their crowdfunding for the phones, and the jolla folks were all like 'be happy we gave you any back' and then went on to pour the investors' money into other failed projects.
yes, stay away and don't help jolla do anything. they are charlatans.
I think an organic way if they really wanted to make a difference is to truly open sources if SailfishOS 100%, in the same time to use the OS and some of specialised componenta for automotive and contractual business projects (lile google, telegram, HashiCoro, you name it). Sell devices, etc.
Benefits: they would skyrocket in popularity and code quality without increasing the team and maintenance cost.
This way I would contribute to it with my money and time!
Yeah but the core issue is that all apps for digital services for both private and government, at least in my EU country, are only shipped for the iOS/Android duopoly.
So having yet another 100th FOSS linux phone that won't run those apps is pointless until apps for these phones are shipped with feature parity, and they probably won't get shipped until these phones reach some critical mass adoption, and they won't get critical mass adoption because they don't run the popular apps.
If this is similar to LineageOS, then it's always potentially only a matter of time until some banking and payment apps stop working due to failing security attestation pushed by a Google update.
We need native apps that pass attestation out of the box for that phone/OS, not relying on hacks that may or may not work in the future.
This is not good UX and it poisons the well if you push users to a new platform then they discover some apps don't work as you promised.
Because FIDO2 is not enough for non-tech-savvy people.
The main issue is potential confusion about what transaction they’re actually signing. For example, a malicious browser extension can pretend the site sends money to X while actually sending it to Y.
The European PSD2 directive mandates that the 2FA scheme must let the user see what they’re about to sign. At the very least, that includes the amount and part of the recipient’s IBAN. FIDO2 doesn’t have that.
It’s the reason I own a device that looks like this [0]. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to transfer money at all due to the lack of banking apps that work on Linux phones.
In this case, wouldn't FIDO2 only be used to log into the bank's website, not to sign individual transactions? (Corresponding to Mode2 in the Wikipedia article you provided?) Would this "mode2" only usage be allowed under European law, given that there is no transaction involving an amount of money taking place?
Banks used to give us those RSA tokens in the past for securely logging in to the web UI, but then discovered they can cut down on cost since everyone has two brands of smartphones.
No doubt. At least with FIDO2, people can provide their own hardware key, and get real security rather than a rolling number generated by a compromised algorithm [1].
Your point seems to be "Some Jolla phones can run some Android apps," while GP's issue is that "It's not true that all Jolla phones can run all Android apps."
That's fair, but in my experience for many people the camera and/or battery are the main reasons to upgrade to a new phone (Also the reason why the presentations focus on the camera for a big chunk of time usually I'd guess) so if they want to compete with that it makes sense to have a decent camera.
It is enabled by smartphone reviewers excluding it from thickness measurements. I bet camera bumps would be a lot less prominent if they were clearly represented.
Well done, congratulations. My next phone will certainly be European to the root. Will be nice to come preinstalled with some free European (apps, socials and video hosting, like Vivaldi browser, HugstonOne local AI, Protonmail, Libreoffice, w-social, vimeo, mastodon, lemmy etc.
(I agree with your comment. To add). Fairphone can be gotten with stock Android, but also "/e/OS", which is a fork of LineageOS, and presents itself as both more privacy focused and de-googled than stock Android.
So it also comes down to what kind of OS you want. I find SailfishOS interesting, but I also really like the hardware of the Fairphone.
Yes to both. Sailfish is a reasonably vanilla Linux with GNU userland. You install libhybris if you want to run Android software in addition to the native software.
This project has been going for years. Good to see it lives on.
IMO there's a paradox with these privacy-focused mobile solutions. Just as with the expensive flagship corporate devices, the massive price tags suggest an assumption that we are doing all our computing on mobile. That's now the case for most normies. But for anyone who really cares about their privacy (not to mention sanity), there's a better solution available: repatriate most of one's computing to a laptop. At which point all these mobile devices become unjustifiably expensive. Hence the paradox.
PS: downvoting a reasoned opinion, apart from being lazy and toxic in any community, does not constitute a rebuttal.
huge notch and huge bottom bezel with mediocre Mediatek Dimensity 7100, all this for 650EUR with specs worse than 200EUR phones, that's like 450EUR for software, a bit high surcharge...
It's what you get when you have no phone manufacturing supply chains anymore because you shipped them all to China 20+ years ago then lost the OS wars to Apple and Google leaving you with no local phone industry. Then it's gonna cost you through the nose when you're making, what are now to your industry, niche low volume items.
Remember when you could buy EU made Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons? Even the chargers were made in Finland back then.
>As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not.
Well please go on, spill the tea, don't leave us hanging. This would be very interesting to hear.
>For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.
Well, according to my google-fu, the factory closures from Finland and germany were relocated to Hungary and Romania, so still EU, therefore the EU could have maintained a domestic phone manufacturing sector in its lowest cost countries as well, if they had kept those fabs and not close them down as well to move everything to china.
Everything about this screams of corporate greed and mismanagement on Nokia's part, way before Microsoft entered the picture.
I dislike the board that brought Elop in, and promised him a bonus if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, and they were also the ones that decided to off-shore factories and R&D into Eastern Europe and India.
Unfortunately Nokia was doomed because it was too slow and bureaucratic and could not adapt to the iPhone... Contrast with Samsung that managed to quickly churn out iphone "clones" and to iterate quickly.
What does MS have to do with this? The Nokia factory shuffling and strikes GP was mentioning happened before MS took over.
And people love to blame MS but Nokia was a sinking ship already by that point. MS was just a new captain added to steer the Titanic but the same fate was inevitable, as its home grown MeeGo/Maemo platform arrived too late and to too little adoption to stand a chance against the already established iOS and Android platforms who were throwing infinity money on becoming the undisputed mobile duopoly platforms, selling 10x as many devices as Nokia was selling Maemo N900s. It was already over for Nokia by that point same as it was for Blackberry. Nokia's own engineers admitted this the moment they got to play with the first iPhone at their Espoo HQ.
That's like blaming a drunk driver for hitting a guy that previously shot himself in the head.
Nothing MS could have done would have changed that fate for the better. WHat did people expect MS to have done?
You're missing the point to argue in bad faith. The point was the even if a drunk driver hadn't run over Nokia, they'd still be dead from the Android and iOS onslaught, doesn't matter who ran over their corpse after that. A judge won't make you a murderer for running over a corpse, just a drunk driver, this is such a weird hill to die on.
BTW, we're still waiting on the Nokia insider details you were mentioning before.
I won't spill any beans, some stuff is easy to find online, the other I usually keep my NDAs.
Nokia is still pretty much around, and owns where UNIX was born in case you missed that part of history.
While we had issues, the burning memo platform was the killer for the third party developer ecosystem, just coming around the hill to move from classical Symbian into Qt/PIPS, in a UNIX culture, to be told to go Windows.
Hold on a second, let's backtrack. First you say you can "tell stories about the factory rampdowns", then when pressed to tell those stories you say you can't "because of NDAs" .... from 20 years ago on a business that's now defunct ... not sure how any of that would be enforceable today, leading me to believe you're either chasing clout for upvotes, or bs-ing. But OK, sure, let's ignore all that for now and move to the next point.
Secondly, you keep bringing up Stephen Elop's "burning memo" several times in this thread as the root cause of Nokia's failure, but when i use my google-fu to go back to the world of 2011, I see that Symbian had fallen to 31% market share from 44% the previous year and Maemo/Meego had a <1% market share, so it's clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together than Symbian was in freefall and irredeemable against iOS and Android, and loosing them money, and Maemo/Meego was far too late to the party with an insignificant market share to rise up against iOS and Android, also loosing them money. So given this obvious loose-money loose-money situation Nokia was in, why wasn't the "burning memo" to stop the bleed, the right choice at the time?
People say this was the wrong solution, but nobody ever says what the right solution was. Maybe because they don't have a better solution, and burning it was the only right one. So you're probably looking at the unsalvageable past through rose tinted glasses.
>I guess it is too hard to find stuff like, Followed by a couple of years later
Why are you sharing links to things I already said I knew? I was was asking if you can share things that aren't on google.
All that shows how EU and Nokia moved manufacturing out of the EU out of greed and mismanagement. And now people ask why phones made in the EU cost crazy money.
Wow, the ex-CEO of Nokia said that "the thing that failed was a bad idea", wow hindsight 20/20, most genious CEO ever. Now if mister Megamind CEO here could tell us what would have been the alternative better things Nokia should have done instead, in order to NOT fail, that would actually be interesting.
Define "not looking dead" to you. Look at their sales, share price, market share and profit trajectory in 2011. From the investors and bean counters perspective it's the very definition of dead. They were losing 11% market share in last year alone!!! How is that not dead?
MS actually prolonged Nokia's existence, since only they had the cash to burn on the impossible mission of catching up with Google and Apple ecosystem, while Nokia alone could not sustain those losses by itself.
I think of those two, the OS wars is the much more substantial EU/US difference. It's not like Apple is making much hardware in the US, yet they wade in pools of cash.
It's always surprising to see this type of comments on HN. Jolla is not Apple, they barely scrunged 10K orders for this phone, they can't afford the economy of scale that other mainstream vendors can.
The notch is a bit silly, given that you have the bezel at the bottom, but I guess it could be ergonomics.
I believe the phone is designed around feedback for customers/potential customers. Which tells me that other people have very different phone usage from my own. I would have asked for a much smaller phone and a €200 price tag. The processor and even a shitty camera doesn't really bother me. I just want a cheap phone that can run like five apps (sadly one is the type that won't work, i.e. payments), and not run Android or iOS.
There is a huge supply chain surplus of notch displays as nobody wants them so I guess they decided that "real open source" folks don't care about design and bought them for pennies.
what good cameras? all I see is "Sony" without mentioning chip, even cheap phones like Poco X7 Pro or similar have nowadays comparable cameras as what they claim
Just an FYI... I don't know what their service is like but they won't respond to my emails asking for a refund so, tomorrow I have to contact my CC provider now. Not happy :-(
>99 € down payment — deducted from final price, fully refundable
Uhhhh… so why isn’t that final price stated, even provisionally?
I mean, if it’s going to be a 300€ phone, imma gonna bite. But if it’s going to be a 500+€ phone, I am going to want to know ahead of time. I don’t like surprises where cost is concerned. Leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.
Low quantity electronics like this have that problem. 600€ makes sense. The fact that you can buy a phone for much less than that, or a car for 15,000€ is a testament to what is possible at scale... When I saw single thousands quantities mentioned on the linked page I went "oh no..."
“As described in the architecture documentation Sailfish OS consists of a variety of components, some of which are proprietary and closed source (such as some hardware-specific kernel modules, or other software licensed under commercial terms), and most of which are open source.”
They removed open source components from “architecture documentation”
The os is impossible to build and test like linux despite of being based on open source project like linux, wayland, QT, etc.
SailfishOS is closer source than Android. Android you can compile and degoogle it.
As of late 2023, Jolla, the Finnish mobile software company behind the Sailfish OS, was acquired by its former management team. They bought from Rostelcom. So they sold to Rostelecom and original management “bought” back.
The original Jolla Oy company filed for bankruptcy in 2024, but the business operations and employees were successfully transferred to this new management-owned entity in late 2023.
1. Positive cashflow can be made in a honest way if they really wanted to make a difference. By now yhis project would boom and overtake apple and android, not the case. They even sold to Rostelecom and Yandex.
2. New owners? More open? Any evidence?
3. Time doesn’t fade facts.
It doesn't have, because no one sane thinks there is some Asia in other sense than geographical, yet many people believe there is some Europe that can have its own smartphone or other alternatives.
In all practical ways Jolla is as foreign to Romanian or French person as Apple is, because their domestic officials and institutions have zero control over it the same way they have zero control over Apple.
Unless, of course, they are blinded by some big yet empty words of European unity, as many here are.
You just prove that European and Asian has completely different connotations, even if they both has seemingly geographical denotation. First is also used in political context, whereas second isn't. First is used when discussing alternative solutions to US-owned tech and services, and second is not.
No one goes out saying that Pad Thai is Asian alternative to freaking spaghetti, and people living across Asia should eat Pad Thai to get some food sovereignty.
It all starts with open formats, open data and open apis. Unless this is somehow guaranteed by law for interaction with public entities, it's going to be hard for any FOSS projects or independent apps/developers.
Without that, we have a situation where almost every bank tries to shove their stupid android app in your face so they can more easily track you. They also force you to their authentication mechanisms, instead of using already working ones. There are no APIs that are usable, only if you have $$$$$. They'll just ignore you if you're a regular client and want to download your data automatically via a reasonable mechanism, etc.
If only banks can write apps and have closed API, they will
You're correct but even more it is a Chinese platform with a Chinese cellular stack that runs linux and on top of all that the apps software is Finnish (so "European").
It is a very misleading title, indeed.
Edit: Sorry you got flagged to death. You should not post blasphemous comments ;)
Yes so the other Chinese... the point being that none of that is "European". I used "Chinese" on purpose to highlight the glaring issue with calling this "European alternative"...
You can disagree but at least try to make an analogy that makes a modicum of sense...
The main issue is that "Europe" is not able to make a phone. They have the choice between American and Chinese at large (mainland and Taiwan) platforms, including cellular stacks, and then most likely manufacturing in mainland China and/or via contractors like Foxconn (also Chinese sphere as from Taiwan).
So indeed, the "full stack" claim here is to be taken in the narrowest sense possible, i.e. the apps software on top of the Linux kernel (and still from other comments it seems they also use Android drivers).
This is the third phone on the HN main page. I’m happy to see this flurry of work at real competition in the market, but I hope the companies can survive and respond to CSVEs.
Other comments have links to more details, but in short: do not support this company.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
You're probably responding because of the Jolla tablet :)
To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.
That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.
The firm with partly russian ownership went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The russian fork of the software lives on as AuroraOS in their local market but the current Jolla has no ties to russia.
I've been using Jolla/Sailfish since the first launch, totally love it.
Apropos of the fact that nobody ever shows the actual OS, I did do a video showing the actual OS, if anyone wants to see it being used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pMfezSulhw
To me this is way ahead of iOS/Android, the native browser sucks, and it requires some massaging to get everything running smoothly, but the UX is second to none. That fact well supported by how many features have been copied by Apple/Google over the years.
Good video, thanks. What was that yellow phone in the video?
Nokia banana phone (8110) running Gerda Linux.
https://archive.luxferre.top/gerdaos
I appreciate the video, thank you!!
Can you install Firefox?
Firefox 91 is installed on OS 5.0.0.73. Jolla just needs to spend resources to keep it up-to-date.
HN discussion from four months ago, including reports from people who have been using Jolla phones for some time (e.g., me):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785840
A question I ask rather here than on that old thread: Is it possible to attach a monitor, mouse and keyboard to a jolla phone with sailfish and run a linux desktop?
It looks like keyboard works, mouse works when some settings are set, monitor doesn't.
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/q-enable-external-keyboard-mo...
Not now, and probably not in the near future.
Don't buy if this is your main goal.
I have a NexPhone on order for this very reason. I can't wait to see how it will work out.
Thanks, this looks very interesting! For reference: https://nexphone.com/
Nokia N900 was really great, Jolla has some of the former team people.
I only jumped into Android after my Symbian phone died, and by then Symbian Belle, with QT and PIPS (PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian OS), it was already shapping great.
That Burning Memo was really a downer.
"Burning the boats," in the form of getting rid of Jolla (and whatever happened to Meego) is one of those management aphorisms that needs to die. As it turns out, having an alternative to Windows phone would've been a better decision. No guarantee of success, but less of an irrecoverable failure at least. Where is that Elop guy now?
Enjoying his golden parachute
I'll say one good thing in hindsight about Elop. He's not all over the Epstein files like another MS executive of the era.
Edit: Wow, I tried to be discrete and not mention him by name but I notice every time I mention Steven Sinofsky was close to Epstein I get downvoted a lot here. Look at this one I found searching for "elop" for example: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA006576...
As long as they weren't under-age I could tolerate a couple of Russian prostitutes peeing on him in exchange for a commercially viable Nokia handset business.
Anyone with the means to travel to Epstein's private island had the means to travel to a place where prostitution is legal and do what you want with legitimacy. You only would have gone through him if you wanted someone trafficked. Age of the "prostitute" can only make association worse, never OK.
I think this person is joking. For one, they're mixing metaphors between Epstein and the rumored Trump pee tape, then tying it into Nokia where neither seems to apply.
I was indeed making light of a grim situation. Not only did the people in Epstein's web commit particularly heinous crimes, those crimes were subsequently used to gain influence over people with economic and national security responsibilities, in order to bend them to the priorities of foreign powers. I take all of that very seriously.
Nevertheless, apparently without any hidden agendas, Stephen Elop destroyed a legendary company and lost thousands of dedicated and competent people their jobs.
I'm not really sure how Epstein files are related to Elop making a malicious (some say, stupid, but I don't believe it) decision. But I'm gonna use this argument from now on, relevant or not.
– they dropped production – at least they are not in Epstein files, like some other people
– they drove over speed limit! - at least they are not in Epstein files
I thought the n900 did some things better than the n9. The biggest problem was lack of portrait mode. I didn't understand at the time why they didn't "just" tweak the n900 ui instead of rewriting everything.
Loved my N900 also, it was peak phone for me.
But more importantly, we need an alternative to two big tech companies who are cranking the enshittification dial right up while also remaining under a particular country's laws.
What does full-stack mean here? Phone is fully produced in Europe? Software and online storage fully provided by European company?
edit: I want this phone, I have reserved a slot in the coming batch.
Just posing as an average Joe here, someone who does not host their own storage, calendar, contacts, phone tracking, remote wipe, the "free" features Google and Apple are known for on their phones.
Usually 'full stack' just means software. Here it means a true Linux phone (Sailfish OS) plus Android compatibility with sandboxing. The C2 model is made in Turkey from Asian parts. The new phone is manufactured in Asia, but the final assembly, QA, and software flashing are done in Finland.
This isn't for people with a consumer mindset. It’s for people who want a Linux computer in their pocket, more privacy, and still want to run some Android apps.
But even the full software stack isn't European as it runs on a Mediatek platform (ie. all the cellular stack and platform software is from Mediatek, which is from Taiwan). It's the apps software stack on top of the Linux kernel that is potentially "European".
There are no longer any cellular chipset vendors based in Europe, afaik, so there's really no alternative. It's also hard to see how they will ever again be one.
WW3
There are phones that can run "true Linux" out there, and there even are ports of Sailfish OS for some of them, but Jolla phones were never part of those and rely on Android drivers instead.
Seems that Jolla C2 can run "close-to" mainline kernel: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/mainline-linux-kernel-for-the...
It's a great work by a community member, but it's not something Jolla is supporting and it still has a long way to go.
Pinephone/pro
What else use main line kernel without blob ?
People also successfully use Librem 5 (which I happen to use), OnePlus 6, Pixel 3A and some others. There's not a lot to choose from, sure, but they do exist.
Nothing else, really.
The previous Jolla C2 phone was built by Reeder in Turkey - they don't seem to say anything about the new phone
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/jolla-c2-out-of-stock/27573/5
Let us clarify here as it is very different indeed.
The Jolla C2 Community Phone is done in collaboration with Reeder, who is the HW vendor. This means Reeder sources the components, plans the production and does the manufacturing in Turkey. Jolla provides the complete software stack (Sailfish OS) which is installed by Reeder in the manufacturing.
In the new Jolla Phone everything is different. Jolla is the vendor, has designed the product itself, done the component sourcing and pays directly to the component vendors. We control the pipeline. Further, we have secured our position for the initial memory batch with advance purchase.
Also, to be clear: Reeder has no involvement in the new Jolla Phone.
Thank you for asking, very good points to clarify!
When I first read the headline I thought all hardware components are European as well. Seems like it's referring to the software stack only.
Apparently "full-stack alternative" means "layered on top of Android" these days, as Jolla does with libhybris.
From what I understand it's the opposite, an android compatibility thing layered on top of a linux base.
It's both; the one I mentioned is for system drivers, the one you're talking about is for running applications (which you can also do on a regular non-Halium GNU/Linux using e.g. Waydroid).
I'm sure that if you tell Jolla about a relatively modern mobile SOC with mainline linux support, they'll look into it instead of relying on libhybris.
They can rely on libhybris if they want, why should I care - I just object to calling that "a full-stack alternative", especially when alternatives do exist.
Modern SOC alternatives for a phone that can be used as a daily driver? Please do tell...
Modern full-stack alternatives exist. I've been daily driving a Librem 5 running a Debian derivative for years.
That wasn't modern when they released it in 2020. Jolla chose a little more pragmatism for their hardware in the hope that they actually sell phones to other people than 100% open-source purists. I find it funny when dudes like you go all "well awkshwally" on them...
I use my Librem 5 as a daily driver, and I’m certainly not an open source purist.
What I do care about is that my phone isn’t going to run into obsolescence a few years down the road (due to hard kernel forks and YOLO’ed device drivers that are not going to be updated for newer kernels).
How is it nowadays ?
I can't find recent demos of the phone, everything is a few years old on YouTube now, and I know the device is still in development.
How usable the browser and camera are ?
Can you get a full day of battery ?
I type this in a browser on the phone.
Camera: https://social.librem.one/@dos/tagged/shotonlibrem5
Battery: I unplugged it from the charger 10 hours ago, it's currently at 55%. Typically it's up to 22 hours when suspended, up to 12 hours when idling without suspend and about 3-5 hours of active use depending on what you're doing. Could be better, but can be worked with.
It sure was, it's a 2019 design with a 2018 SoC - but you may want to read the comments you reply to again, as that's hardly the point.
What I was trying to tell you with my original reply to you is that Jolla chose a different point on the free/pramatic curve of available SoCs. They selected a phone that's more likely to be used by average people rather than a fully open one. (You can still see in this very thread, complains about the high price for what it offers, showing they haven't fully succeeded, at that.)
Pointing out that they still rely on Android drivers for booting the thing is a little tone-deaf from my perspective when they're basically choosing a different path towards a similar goal to Purism and other alternative mobile vendors: higher availability of non Google, non Apple mobile devices. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that. And like I explained the reason for their choice is not nefarious but a pragmatic one.
And what I was trying to tell you is that they're free to choose whatever point on the curve they want and pursue that as long as they don't misrepresent what they're doing. What is "full-stack alternative" supposed to mean when it relies on the very thing it's supposed to be an alternative to? What is Purism's effort then, "even fuller-stack alternative"? Words have meanings.
> User configurable physical Privacy Switch - turn off your microphone, bluetooth, Android apps, or whatever you wish
The "whatever you wish" seems to indicate that this is a regular switch that can be configured to turn off certain functionality. Is that true?
I was hoping for a solution that physically disconnects the microphone/cameras/etc, or at least acts at some lower level than the OS. But if it's flexible and configurable then it sadly doesn't look as secure.
It could do both, but it does say “or whatever”, not “and”.
How would you have a user-configurable switch that physically disconnects things? The mechanism for that sounds complex. I'm not a hardware person, but I imagine you'd need to route the traces for each possible component to the switch and then have like a dip switch panel to control which behaviors are controlled by the switch. Either that or a software-controlled equivalent to a dip switch panel that can only be configured in the bootloader, otherwise the software-controlled physical disconnect would be no safer than a software disconnect.
Im not a hardware person either, but ex the button physically turns off the canera, and software polls for camera power and can respond
Ah I think I understand what you're suggesting now. This hypothetical switch is both a physical and software disconnect. Some features like the camera would be physically disconnected by the switch and therefore would not be user-configurable but then some other features (for example, GPS) could additionally be software disconnected at the same time.
That seems like a neat idea, but IMO I wouldn't trust the software-controlled half of it, so I'd end up only using the non-configurable physical portion of it.
That makes sense but it's also just a guess. The quote above would be equally applicable to an entirely software option that is toggled with a physical switch rather than an option in a menu.
Since these things are almost certainly digital devices, just having a switch that cuts power to them could work.
As soon as it is sufficiently complex, it becomes a "trust me bro" switch.
The most important question missing from the FAQ is whether bank apps, government ID apps, etc. will work with this phone.
Everything hinges on app support.
Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities. Most companies offer them only for iOS and Android.
If your smartphone can't run the vast majority of apps, it is basically dead on arrival. Nobody is going to buy it when they need to carry another phone anyways.
The only way around this is either emulation (which Google is trying very hard to sabotage) or heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms. I don't think either option is likely to work.
They don’t need to specifically support “niche platforms,” which will never happen anyway. They just need to support the one, universal platform every device (be it phone, laptop or desktop) can always access, the web.
And they don't want to, because that experiment ran for around 20 years and resoundingly failed. Turns out it's really hard to stop the bottom quintile of users from entering all their credentials into just about any website that looks similar to what they are used to - and then their identity/money is just gone.
Stopping those users without a trusted authority deciding which electron-wrapped websites are genuine is an unsolved problem, I think.
If the app truly just plumbed a webview and cert verification - which has been doable for over a decade - it would be very portable and this wouldn't be a problem.
The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.
> The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.
Both can be true. Many (most?) online banking apps are just shitty wrapped javascript, that also uses an awful lot of system APIs.
I'm using a couple of different banks, and not a single one has anything close to a native app. Because how nice would that be? Responsive interface (since it doesn't need to load every single view from the server), instant search over your transactions (since the DB can be cached locally), instant access to all the PDFs in your inbox... but no.
>heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms.
should work for banking and governmental applications, especially as those should already have the workflow in place to support niche platforms.
> Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities.
I've never owned a smartphone in my life and are not planning on getting one, and I'm going through life just fine.
Maybe you don't live in any European country. 2FA with cell phone has become compulsory for most banking procedures in Spain, to the point that I can even no longer assist my parents without being present there with them. Even when there is a web app, this randomly forces the user to confirm identity via phone. Every day this extends to more and more official proceduress these days (e.g. loging to EU pages, regional government paperwork, access to hospital records and prescriptions...), and unfortunately it seems to me that the phone as official ID might be the future. In this scenario, projects like this one cannot be really useful without some standardization or layer that makes it acceptable by the government.
In two banks I was in in last 20 years before and after Payment Services Directive implementation, I was a secondary user to the account. I could do almost anything on the account which saved my mother lots of stress. It's enough for her to check balance and outgoing transactions and rest lies in my hands. Wouldn't that help you as well?
In Poland we have a rather well-functioning digital services platform. Tho, two weeks ago news outlets raised a small tantrum that our digital identity wallet application may be non-compliant with the upcoming EU standards. But as for now, once you log into the application (there are few ways - ID card with chip, 3rd party login by bank and so on), the session is kept for a year. After that's done you can log on desktops by QR code or pass data from app to app.
mObywatel app tries to include all the essentials: from digital ID copy (identity confirm, validation for you and someone else) your DNI-equivalent protection (won't allow to process your personal information in some cases). There's healthcare services handling (prescriptions, but we also have a dedicated app), inbox/outbox for official matters, payments and taxes, section for car and vehicles (penalty points, accident reporting), environment (reporting accidents, air quality, flood alerts) and travel (rail tickets wallet, tips and warning for traveling destinations - atm it shows that Spain is on 4th level terrorist threat). Tbh, it's way better than used to be few years ago with complex login flow that could break midway.
It's all convenient stuff but older generations are already digitally marginalized and we may indeed head into the future where we won't be able to do anything without a smartphone, in both real and digital life.
Many banks restrict the number and capabilities of secondary users. In the end I had to get a power of attorney, but for me observing these changes is just a warning. I see a pervasive use of a phone as means of authentication and the compulsory nature of hardware-bound digital IDs is penetrating our society. That is a barrier for elderly people but also for other groups, specially when those requirements are not accompanied by standards (i.e. why does a French person need to get a new ID to work with Spanish bureaucracy) and also because the phone itself is an unsubsidized cost. Not to mention when one is travelling to countries with locked networks, losing the phone or, closer to the topic here,the lack of trust on generic phone platforms, which enforces a duopoly (Google Android + iOS) preventing new technologies to enter the market.
Don't know about Spain, but in France we can be sent codes via SMS for things like 3d secure.
We actually moved to Europe a number of years ago, and have lived in two different countries here. In my experience, there's often alternatives for 2FA that they'll tell you about once they know that you do not own a phone.
Although I haven't held one in my hands, apparently there's Flutter support for Harmony OS. There are quite a lot of mobile apps implemented in Flutter and Dart, and platform support for alternative phone OSs looks doable.
There is a Wiki maintained by users. In short, it depends :)
https://sailfishos.wiki/books/compatibility-list-of-android-...
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The need to support apps - when you are constantly internet-connected anyhow - is becoming less and less important. You can now pin many websites to your phone’s “desktop” and have them run identically to native apps, and sometimes with even better start-up performance.
So long as a service is being provided identically on a mobile website as it is in a native app, you can pin that website and get just the same experience without needing a native app.
My bank officially forbids access from a mobile browser (but it still works by selecting "Desktop site" in Firefox).
It's not a huge hassle to keep another phone around for these things, if you really want to have a Jolla phone.
Of course they cannot answer this in the FAQ, because they have no insight into how thousands of different banks and other third parties will make their decisions on which devices to allow.
They have 10,000 preorders and will be in Mobile World Congress
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anttisaarnio_just-incredible-...
That definitely seems to be the better alternative amongst all others. While I appreciate all the energy put into graphene or lineage it appears to me like way too much energy for Half baked solutions. Depending on google good will in the future too. I can understand them as hack, not that much as industrial proposals.
Reduce it to the size of iPhone 5 and make the main camera flush with the surface, and I'll buy it in a heartbeat.
The size has been decided based on a poll within the community. I also wish it was smaller, but the majority has decided...
I think the EU in general is shortsighted if they don’t spend resources to complete what they already have for basic technology of their own: phone, telcom infra, AI models, cloud providers, etc.
I would say the same for global south. I am a US citizen, but the rest of the world is crazy to depend so much on US and China.
The phone looks good. I have looked at GrapheneOS, but not Jolla.
Great initiative but too big. Give me a 3.5" phone, under 100g with 2 weeks battery life, and we're in business!
Oh the joy, of being able to back it up with restic, integrate my email, text and script based workflows, and have total control of the ports and software that runs on the device. That would be amazing!
why stop at 2 weeks. why not ask for 2 months and 50g. and 3 usb c ports. all with full functionality. you might want to connect two monitors to your phone after all.
I invested in this. I am quite sick of the attitudes of some of the big american phone players.
This is coming from someone who has for the longest time been invested in Apple and the Apple Ecosystem. I adored the ease of integration of everything. The amazing synergy between their designers, and their engineers. I never really minded that things came later to the Apple Ecosystem. It just worked. And it was great.
But the golden statue, the absolute pathetic DMA attitude from Apple. It started to get to me. And I am trying to now get out of that Apple Ecosystem.
I don't think it'll be smooth. I think the process will be painful as I try to work around some of the limitations. No NFC payments will be my biggest painpoint as an ADHD addled man who forgets his wallet at least 3x a week. But it's worth trying. And it's worth supporting alternatives.
another adhd guy here. I haven't tried it, so i can't vouch for it to any degree of certainty, but maybe it's an option to have your main payment card in a sleeve inside your phone case? Even if it works, it's only a drop in the bucket, but maybe that's enough if you consider the lack of NFC payment a major issue. thank you for pushing for an alternative to android and apple
That’s actually the plan going forward - right now I actually have a MagSafe wallet - and that does help a little bit.
Tons of non-Apple phones support NFC payments, unless you're specifically referring to Jolla.
Sure, but they’re android and I don’t necessarily consider google better
I don't understand how the physical privacy switch can also be user configurable. Wouldn't configurability mean it's a software privacy switch?
It couple physically disable camera + mic + whatever, and ALSO have hooks that enable you to do extra things with it in software?
What does it mean it's "governed by European privacy". Isn't Europe who wants to prevent privacy with things like Chat Control?
Chat Control was nowhere near to become law. Last Fall, they would have voted about whether they really talk about it, but even that failed. Even if it would have been successful, nothing would have guaranteed that it becomes a law, or that it wouldn’t have been watered down completely. And the whole topic was kept alive somehow when it was well known even in September that the proposal was dead, because Germany doesn’t support it, and they didn’t have the necessary number of votes. Yet, there were articles even in November which stated that Germany decided only at that time that they don’t support it, which was obviously not true. It seemed to me like an artificial bubble of outrage. It was a bad proposal, so the outrage was needed until September. It’s just strange that people still pretend that it’s not dead half year after it became impossible to even consider it in the parliament.
And it was Europe who, every time, fought back and won.
It works both ways.
EU has GDPR. US has the Cloud Act.
Chat Control is a proposal. The other two above are established regulations on either side of the Atlantic.
Given that it has been struck down multiple times now, it's the minority of European Union members. Making a blanket statement of "Europe" (which btw is not the same as EU) is just insulting.
I noticed that the orders hasn't bumped up that much since this was shared last time. Not really sure I see the growth here is showing a lot of demand for a European smartphone - although I could totally be wrong given the geopolitical situation.
The preorder did hit 10k, this is the normal order screen
If they were smart they would show those number here. It's like walking past an empty restaurant.
> 8GB RAM, you can upgrade your RAM to 12GB with 50€
Possibly the best per storage RAM price on the market right now!
I bought the pre-order thing, but not sure what to expect - I guess to get an email at some point so I can buy it..
We need this, an alternative to Apple and Google.
I guess this is a descendent of my 16 year old Nokia N900, and probably the best phone I had. It ran the Maemo operating system, and its UI was a forerunner to a lot of what is current. It also had a built in, full, terminal.
The OS is proprietary.
Large parts of the OS are open source though. Not just the Linux kernel and userland, but also some specific things:
Sailfish: https://github.com/sailfishos Android layer: https://github.com/libhybris/libhybris
Yes, it's how they make money as a company and pay their developers. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the choice of Sailfish OS instead of iOS or Android.
Proprietary is not necessarily bad.
... and yet it's a tonne more developer friendly than Android is becoming.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the only phone related announcement that matters this week. That and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214645
Anyone use the Jolla C2? Seems pretty interesting (not fully European though)
I'm deeply saddened that they didn't add a 3.5mm audio/headphone jack.
There was a community poll and I believe a headphone jack was the second-most requested feature after a MicroSD slot.
I appreciate they have to draw a line under the feature set somewhere, however the cost of an audio jack is literal pennies and I'm quite sure the PCB designers could have squeezed it in somewhere.
As someone who has no interest in wireless accessories it makes me unwilling to buy the phone.
>they didn't add a 3.5mm audio/headphone jack.
This works wonderfully in quiet environments. But the moment you have any significant background noise, and need noise-cancelling headphones, this ends up being useless because no headsets do noise cancelling over a headphone jack - only internal batteries or USB connectivity.
Even with those rare wired-optional headsets that accept headphone cords, the noise cancelling functionality gets shut off the moment you plug the headphone jack in.
Seems like a very poor choice to build in a headphone jack. Why not just use usb c to headphone adapter?
why does it seem like a very poor choice to you, exactly?
as for using an adapter, it's one extra thing to carry and also difficult to charge with simultaneously
What's wrong with 3.5mm headphone jack?
What's the sandboxing & app permissions story like on Sailfish OS? Is it just ordinary Linux, i.e. apps can basically do anything?
They use a custom-made Firejail-based solution called SailJail: https://github.com/sailfishos/sailjail
I would strongly advise do not spend any money on Jolla devices. Check their history of Tablet and other preorder products?
100s of donors were stiffed of greater than half the money they put into their crowdfunding for the phones, and the jolla folks were all like 'be happy we gave you any back' and then went on to pour the investors' money into other failed projects.
yes, stay away and don't help jolla do anything. they are charlatans.
I think an organic way if they really wanted to make a difference is to truly open sources if SailfishOS 100%, in the same time to use the OS and some of specialised componenta for automotive and contractual business projects (lile google, telegram, HashiCoro, you name it). Sell devices, etc.
Benefits: they would skyrocket in popularity and code quality without increasing the team and maintenance cost.
This way I would contribute to it with my money and time!
Jolla has announced a new phone using its Sailfish OS so providing a full-stack European alternative to the Android/Apple duopoly.
Yeah but the core issue is that all apps for digital services for both private and government, at least in my EU country, are only shipped for the iOS/Android duopoly.
So having yet another 100th FOSS linux phone that won't run those apps is pointless until apps for these phones are shipped with feature parity, and they probably won't get shipped until these phones reach some critical mass adoption, and they won't get critical mass adoption because they don't run the popular apps.
Check out this thread on Sailfish OS forums regarding EU Banking apps. I was surprised on how many actually work.
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/banking-apps-on-sailfish-os/1...
If this is similar to LineageOS, then it's always potentially only a matter of time until some banking and payment apps stop working due to failing security attestation pushed by a Google update.
We need native apps that pass attestation out of the box for that phone/OS, not relying on hacks that may or may not work in the future.
This is not good UX and it poisons the well if you push users to a new platform then they discover some apps don't work as you promised.
Beats me why banks can't use a FIDO2 enabled web site.
Because FIDO2 is not enough for non-tech-savvy people. The main issue is potential confusion about what transaction they’re actually signing. For example, a malicious browser extension can pretend the site sends money to X while actually sending it to Y.
The European PSD2 directive mandates that the 2FA scheme must let the user see what they’re about to sign. At the very least, that includes the amount and part of the recipient’s IBAN. FIDO2 doesn’t have that.
It’s the reason I own a device that looks like this [0]. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to transfer money at all due to the lack of banking apps that work on Linux phones.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Authentication_Program
In this case, wouldn't FIDO2 only be used to log into the bank's website, not to sign individual transactions? (Corresponding to Mode2 in the Wikipedia article you provided?) Would this "mode2" only usage be allowed under European law, given that there is no transaction involving an amount of money taking place?
Banks used to give us those RSA tokens in the past for securely logging in to the web UI, but then discovered they can cut down on cost since everyone has two brands of smartphones.
No doubt. At least with FIDO2, people can provide their own hardware key, and get real security rather than a rolling number generated by a compromised algorithm [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_SecurID#March_2011_system_...
Jolla phones can run Android apps.
Your point seems to be "Some Jolla phones can run some Android apps," while GP's issue is that "It's not true that all Jolla phones can run all Android apps."
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Will it have USB C with DisplayPort alt mode?
No final word as of yet, but in their most recent forum update [1] less than 2 weeks ago they said this is "unlikely for now".
[1] https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/jolla-phone-update-lights-on-...
I think they're working on it, but it isn't sure yet.
I hate the camera bump trend. I don’t need a super fancy camera, just give me something half decent and flush with the device.
The original iPhone SE was the last time I enjoyed a phone’s design.
That's fair, but in my experience for many people the camera and/or battery are the main reasons to upgrade to a new phone (Also the reason why the presentations focus on the camera for a big chunk of time usually I'd guess) so if they want to compete with that it makes sense to have a decent camera.
It is enabled by smartphone reviewers excluding it from thickness measurements. I bet camera bumps would be a lot less prominent if they were clearly represented.
Same. I rarely use the camera. I almost never take photos and when I do it's like a serial number or something that I just don't want to write down.
I do sometimes use the video for remote meetings but I don't care about picture quality for those.
You might like the Pixel 10a/9a, they have an almost flush back. For this thread, not european but instead GrapheneOS capable.
News release:
The world premiere of the European Phone
https://jolla.com/content/uploads/2026/03/Jolla_Phone_PressR...
Well done, congratulations. My next phone will certainly be European to the root. Will be nice to come preinstalled with some free European (apps, socials and video hosting, like Vivaldi browser, HugstonOne local AI, Protonmail, Libreoffice, w-social, vimeo, mastodon, lemmy etc.
What's the difference between this and the Fairphone?
Fairphone produces strictly hardware.
Jolla produces software, SailfishOS. The hardware for this phone is sourced from third party vendors and then assembled and sold by Jolla.
(I agree with your comment. To add). Fairphone can be gotten with stock Android, but also "/e/OS", which is a fork of LineageOS, and presents itself as both more privacy focused and de-googled than stock Android.
So it also comes down to what kind of OS you want. I find SailfishOS interesting, but I also really like the hardware of the Fairphone.
74mm width is too big to hold it comfortable in one hand or put in pocket. I find mobile devices above 71mm width unpractical for daily use.
This looks really cool. Orange, black and white being inspired by scandinavian design felt like a bit of a reach though.
Some people said it's using libhybris. I thought this one was vanilla Linux. Any pointers either way?
Yes to both. Sailfish is a reasonably vanilla Linux with GNU userland. You install libhybris if you want to run Android software in addition to the native software.
This project has been going for years. Good to see it lives on.
IMO there's a paradox with these privacy-focused mobile solutions. Just as with the expensive flagship corporate devices, the massive price tags suggest an assumption that we are doing all our computing on mobile. That's now the case for most normies. But for anyone who really cares about their privacy (not to mention sanity), there's a better solution available: repatriate most of one's computing to a laptop. At which point all these mobile devices become unjustifiably expensive. Hence the paradox.
PS: downvoting a reasoned opinion, apart from being lazy and toxic in any community, does not constitute a rebuttal.
'Approve this transaction in your smartphone app'. That is the killer.
I want to believe! I remember the Palm Pre and webOS, maybe this is the next big thing.
Hmm, die deutsche Version der Seite ist nicht anderes - vielleicht ein Bug?
huge notch and huge bottom bezel with mediocre Mediatek Dimensity 7100, all this for 650EUR with specs worse than 200EUR phones, that's like 450EUR for software, a bit high surcharge...
It's what you get when you have no phone manufacturing supply chains anymore because you shipped them all to China 20+ years ago then lost the OS wars to Apple and Google leaving you with no local phone industry. Then it's gonna cost you through the nose when you're making, what are now to your industry, niche low volume items.
Remember when you could buy EU made Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons? Even the chargers were made in Finland back then.
As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not.
For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.
>As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not.
Well please go on, spill the tea, don't leave us hanging. This would be very interesting to hear.
>For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.
Well, according to my google-fu, the factory closures from Finland and germany were relocated to Hungary and Romania, so still EU, therefore the EU could have maintained a domestic phone manufacturing sector in its lowest cost countries as well, if they had kept those fabs and not close them down as well to move everything to china.
Everything about this screams of corporate greed and mismanagement on Nokia's part, way before Microsoft entered the picture.
Another good reason to dislike M$
I dislike the board that brought Elop in, and promised him a bonus if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, and they were also the ones that decided to off-shore factories and R&D into Eastern Europe and India.
Unfortunately Nokia was doomed because it was too slow and bureaucratic and could not adapt to the iPhone... Contrast with Samsung that managed to quickly churn out iphone "clones" and to iterate quickly.
Sure, if you miss the whole Bada OS failure, and Tizen for that matter.
What does MS have to do with this? The Nokia factory shuffling and strikes GP was mentioning happened before MS took over.
And people love to blame MS but Nokia was a sinking ship already by that point. MS was just a new captain added to steer the Titanic but the same fate was inevitable, as its home grown MeeGo/Maemo platform arrived too late and to too little adoption to stand a chance against the already established iOS and Android platforms who were throwing infinity money on becoming the undisputed mobile duopoly platforms, selling 10x as many devices as Nokia was selling Maemo N900s. It was already over for Nokia by that point same as it was for Blackberry. Nokia's own engineers admitted this the moment they got to play with the first iPhone at their Espoo HQ.
That's like blaming a drunk driver for hitting a guy that previously shot himself in the head.
Nothing MS could have done would have changed that fate for the better. WHat did people expect MS to have done?
Sure, but still, the driver was very intoxicated and ran over the guy, then put the car in reverse and ran over the guy again.
What does the driver matter if the guy was already dead?
I bet a judge would disagree on the inocence of the driver in such scenario.
You're missing the point to argue in bad faith. The point was the even if a drunk driver hadn't run over Nokia, they'd still be dead from the Android and iOS onslaught, doesn't matter who ran over their corpse after that. A judge won't make you a murderer for running over a corpse, just a drunk driver, this is such a weird hill to die on.
BTW, we're still waiting on the Nokia insider details you were mentioning before.
I won't spill any beans, some stuff is easy to find online, the other I usually keep my NDAs.
Nokia is still pretty much around, and owns where UNIX was born in case you missed that part of history.
While we had issues, the burning memo platform was the killer for the third party developer ecosystem, just coming around the hill to move from classical Symbian into Qt/PIPS, in a UNIX culture, to be told to go Windows.
Hold on a second, let's backtrack. First you say you can "tell stories about the factory rampdowns", then when pressed to tell those stories you say you can't "because of NDAs" .... from 20 years ago on a business that's now defunct ... not sure how any of that would be enforceable today, leading me to believe you're either chasing clout for upvotes, or bs-ing. But OK, sure, let's ignore all that for now and move to the next point.
Secondly, you keep bringing up Stephen Elop's "burning memo" several times in this thread as the root cause of Nokia's failure, but when i use my google-fu to go back to the world of 2011, I see that Symbian had fallen to 31% market share from 44% the previous year and Maemo/Meego had a <1% market share, so it's clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together than Symbian was in freefall and irredeemable against iOS and Android, and loosing them money, and Maemo/Meego was far too late to the party with an insignificant market share to rise up against iOS and Android, also loosing them money. So given this obvious loose-money loose-money situation Nokia was in, why wasn't the "burning memo" to stop the bleed, the right choice at the time?
People say this was the wrong solution, but nobody ever says what the right solution was. Maybe because they don't have a better solution, and burning it was the only right one. So you're probably looking at the unsalvageable past through rose tinted glasses.
I guess it is too hard to find stuff like,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-01-17/germany-r...
Followed by a couple of years later,
https://balkaninsight.com/2011/09/30/nokia-leaves-romania-in...
Or I might suggest reading stuff like https://yle.fi/a/3-6886400
The rest, think whatever you feel like.
>I guess it is too hard to find stuff like, Followed by a couple of years later
Why are you sharing links to things I already said I knew? I was was asking if you can share things that aren't on google.
All that shows how EU and Nokia moved manufacturing out of the EU out of greed and mismanagement. And now people ask why phones made in the EU cost crazy money.
>Or I might suggest reading stuff like https://yle.fi/a/3-6886400
Wow, the ex-CEO of Nokia said that "the thing that failed was a bad idea", wow hindsight 20/20, most genious CEO ever. Now if mister Megamind CEO here could tell us what would have been the alternative better things Nokia should have done instead, in order to NOT fail, that would actually be interesting.
Didn't look quite dead to me. Until after MS was done.
Define "not looking dead" to you. Look at their sales, share price, market share and profit trajectory in 2011. From the investors and bean counters perspective it's the very definition of dead. They were losing 11% market share in last year alone!!! How is that not dead?
MS actually prolonged Nokia's existence, since only they had the cash to burn on the impossible mission of catching up with Google and Apple ecosystem, while Nokia alone could not sustain those losses by itself.
I think of those two, the OS wars is the much more substantial EU/US difference. It's not like Apple is making much hardware in the US, yet they wade in pools of cash.
It's always surprising to see this type of comments on HN. Jolla is not Apple, they barely scrunged 10K orders for this phone, they can't afford the economy of scale that other mainstream vendors can.
The notch is a bit silly, given that you have the bezel at the bottom, but I guess it could be ergonomics.
I believe the phone is designed around feedback for customers/potential customers. Which tells me that other people have very different phone usage from my own. I would have asked for a much smaller phone and a €200 price tag. The processor and even a shitty camera doesn't really bother me. I just want a cheap phone that can run like five apps (sadly one is the type that won't work, i.e. payments), and not run Android or iOS.
There is a huge supply chain surplus of notch displays as nobody wants them so I guess they decided that "real open source" folks don't care about design and bought them for pennies.
> I just want a cheap phone that can run like five apps (sadly one is the type that won't work, i.e. payments), and not run Android or iOS.
https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices#Community
you can certainly buy some of the supported smaller devices (e.g. Pixel 3a) and change battery for new
sadly basically nothing newer than 2020
Buy a Xperia XA2 on Ebay for 180€ + 25€ for SFOS license.
Can you really get 200EUR phones with that good cameras?
what good cameras? all I see is "Sony" without mentioning chip, even cheap phones like Poco X7 Pro or similar have nowadays comparable cameras as what they claim
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/next-gen-jolla-phone-update-1...
Cameras:
The primary back camera will feature Sony IMX766 AF 50MP sensor module, known for its quality and performance within the price range
The secondary back camera will be a 13MP ultrawide AF Sony IMX214
Front camera is set to be a 32MP wide lens FF Sony IMX616
I heard and read negative things about them, do they actually ship?
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/update-on-jolla-c2-q4-25-prod...
Yes they do ship phones !
Everyone is stuck on the 2015 tablet failure.
Just an FYI... I don't know what their service is like but they won't respond to my emails asking for a refund so, tomorrow I have to contact my CC provider now. Not happy :-(
Ok, seems management was not change. Same issue with tablet project. Gave up in the end.
> a full-stack European alternative
It is absolutely not. More than misleading title.
People are jumping on this "EU sovereignty" thing band-wagon and milking it for all it's worth.
> It is absolutely not. More than misleading title.
Could you elaborate? Just disagreeing without explaining why doesn’t contribute to the discussion.
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No, they just want to get away from Americans.
This looks interesting. https://e.foundation/e-os/
>99 € down payment — deducted from final price, fully refundable
Uhhhh… so why isn’t that final price stated, even provisionally?
I mean, if it’s going to be a 300€ phone, imma gonna bite. But if it’s going to be a 500+€ phone, I am going to want to know ahead of time. I don’t like surprises where cost is concerned. Leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.
No headphone jack?
I mean 600+ euros is kind of a steep price, doubt I'll ever consider buying one because of that alone.
Also, as an italian, Jolla reminds me a lot of the word "Ciolla", which you can only guess what it's a slang for. That doesn't help.
Low quantity electronics like this have that problem. 600€ makes sense. The fact that you can buy a phone for much less than that, or a car for 15,000€ is a testament to what is possible at scale... When I saw single thousands quantities mentioned on the linked page I went "oh no..."
Italians were also the reason Moana was renamed Vaiana in Europe :D
Maybe it played a part in Italy:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/11/16/disney-renamed-...
But it wouldn’t justify other countries. Apparently it’s a trademark thing:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=04d0b34d-efdb...
true, spaniards are confused too
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1. A company needs a positive cashflow to keep existing.
2. Closed parts of Sailfish are being opened up slowly (There are new owners).
3. The tablet was in 2015, 11 years ago.
4. They are not Russia owned anymore, but Finnish now.
I gave another try to check for any open source update, it is not and added more mess. See here https://docs.sailfishos.org/Develop/Open_Source/ :
“As described in the architecture documentation Sailfish OS consists of a variety of components, some of which are proprietary and closed source (such as some hardware-specific kernel modules, or other software licensed under commercial terms), and most of which are open source.”
They removed open source components from “architecture documentation”
The os is impossible to build and test like linux despite of being based on open source project like linux, wayland, QT, etc.
SailfishOS is closer source than Android. Android you can compile and degoogle it.
Here what I found:
As of late 2023, Jolla, the Finnish mobile software company behind the Sailfish OS, was acquired by its former management team. They bought from Rostelcom. So they sold to Rostelecom and original management “bought” back. The original Jolla Oy company filed for bankruptcy in 2024, but the business operations and employees were successfully transferred to this new management-owned entity in late 2023.
More details here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolla
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Jolla-Acquisition-By-Managemen...
1. Positive cashflow can be made in a honest way if they really wanted to make a difference. By now yhis project would boom and overtake apple and android, not the case. They even sold to Rostelecom and Yandex. 2. New owners? More open? Any evidence? 3. Time doesn’t fade facts.
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> First, it is not European alternative - it is Finnish. _Europe_ is not a single country.
What are you talking about?
Is there a law of nature that you can only refer to origins in terms of countries.
A Finnish alternative is, nyt extension, a European alternative.
It is not innocent like this. In this context European is not simply used as a geographical designation of origin.
No one says that Samsung or Huawei phones are Asian alternatives to iPhone.
If it had any marketing power, people would say that also.
It doesn't have, because no one sane thinks there is some Asia in other sense than geographical, yet many people believe there is some Europe that can have its own smartphone or other alternatives.
In all practical ways Jolla is as foreign to Romanian or French person as Apple is, because their domestic officials and institutions have zero control over it the same way they have zero control over Apple.
Unless, of course, they are blinded by some big yet empty words of European unity, as many here are.
This is completely insane.
When you go out to eat your friends might express the desire to eat Asian food - that doesn't descrikinate between Japanese, Taiwanese, or Thai food.
And yet no one goes to eat European food.
You just prove that European and Asian has completely different connotations, even if they both has seemingly geographical denotation. First is also used in political context, whereas second isn't. First is used when discussing alternative solutions to US-owned tech and services, and second is not.
No one goes out saying that Pad Thai is Asian alternative to freaking spaghetti, and people living across Asia should eat Pad Thai to get some food sovereignty.
It all starts with open formats, open data and open apis. Unless this is somehow guaranteed by law for interaction with public entities, it's going to be hard for any FOSS projects or independent apps/developers.
Without that, we have a situation where almost every bank tries to shove their stupid android app in your face so they can more easily track you. They also force you to their authentication mechanisms, instead of using already working ones. There are no APIs that are usable, only if you have $$$$$. They'll just ignore you if you're a regular client and want to download your data automatically via a reasonable mechanism, etc.
If only banks can write apps and have closed API, they will
Support for open formats and data is also question of policy.
Am I saying something else?
You're correct but even more it is a Chinese platform with a Chinese cellular stack that runs linux and on top of all that the apps software is Finnish (so "European").
It is a very misleading title, indeed.
Edit: Sorry you got flagged to death. You should not post blasphemous comments ;)
Mediatek is a taiwanese company and the Dimensity 7100 platform includes the cellular stack.
Yes so the other Chinese... the point being that none of that is "European". I used "Chinese" on purpose to highlight the glaring issue with calling this "European alternative"...
Your Toyota made in Kentucky is Russian because it uses Siberian steel lol
You can disagree but at least try to make an analogy that makes a modicum of sense...
The main issue is that "Europe" is not able to make a phone. They have the choice between American and Chinese at large (mainland and Taiwan) platforms, including cellular stacks, and then most likely manufacturing in mainland China and/or via contractors like Foxconn (also Chinese sphere as from Taiwan).
So indeed, the "full stack" claim here is to be taken in the narrowest sense possible, i.e. the apps software on top of the Linux kernel (and still from other comments it seems they also use Android drivers).
if it doesn't run GNOME Mobile or KDE it isn't an alternative
How so ? It's not like this is an Android Skin.
It's running a custom Wayland compositor and UI.
Still use all the Linux stack you expect (GCC, Wayland, SystemD, Pulseaudio, RPMs, Dbus ...)
This is the third phone on the HN main page. I’m happy to see this flurry of work at real competition in the market, but I hope the companies can survive and respond to CSVEs.
Other comments have links to more details, but in short: do not support this company.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
You're probably responding because of the Jolla tablet :)
To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.
That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.
The firm with partly russian ownership went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The russian fork of the software lives on as AuroraOS in their local market but the current Jolla has no ties to russia.
> current Jolla has no ties to russia
That we know of. We live in interesting times. I wish they were more forward with how they've made it so they're protected against such interference.