Jolla says Sailfish OS will "mature" to Sailfish 3 during Q3 this year, so today's news is just a preview of what's coming.
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Jalasoft's 'liberty'-touting Accione Sailfish smartphone Jalasoft's 'liberty'-touting Accione Sailfish smartphone It slates the handset on its website as being "designed for Latinos by Latinos".
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Unlike humans who are mostly righties, groups of sailfish don't show any side dominance, making attacks from larger groups, like those with around ten sailfish, especially unpredictable.
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A rugged Sailfish-powered device piloted by Russian post A rugged Sailfish-powered device piloted by Russian post Jolla is not yet breaking out end users for Sailfish OS per market but Pienimäki says that overall the company is now "clearly above" 100k (and below 500k) devices globally.
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The company, which he isn't disclosing at this stage, is interested in "using Sailfish and then having selected Android applications running in Sailfish but no connection with the Google services".
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"Sailfish is independent and open offering, not controlled by large corporates, and thus optimal for local collaboration and customisation," says Pienimäki, responding to a question about why Sailfish has prevailed.
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The Sailfish-powered Fairphone started as a community port project but is now evidently on a more formal footing, with Fairphone today showing Sailfish running on its forthcoming sequel handset.
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Specs wise the 4G handset looks much like Indian OEM Intex's Sailfish powered Aqua Fish smartphone with a 5-inch display, 2GB of RAM, a 1.3GHz Qualcomm processor and Sailfish 2.0.
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That same year, Jolla announced the "world's first crowdsourced tablet" that would run Sailfish and was developed with significant contributions from a global community of developers working on Mer and Sailfish.
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Jolla has recently changed its focus to enterprise customers, but a small dedicated group of die-hard Sailfish fans have kept the consumer Sailfish OS alive and continue to drive its development.
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Latin America is another area where Sailfish is winning friends.
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Instead, Jolla fully embraced Sailfish OS as its primary product.
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At Sailfish Point, earning the certificate took about two years.
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Mobile OS maker Jolla, whose Sailfish platform remains one of the few smartphone alternatives in play these days, has signed an exclusive license to a Chinese consortium to develop a Sailfish-based OS for the country.
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Russian Post is one early customer for Jolla's locally licensed Sailfish flavor.
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The Sailfish platform already supports Russian so language localization is not necessary.
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The most noticeable difference is that Sailfish is far more gesture-oriented.
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I remembered the drifting net with a dead sailfish tangled in it.
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Accompanying the announcement, TRI is switching its OS from Android to Jolla's Sailfish.
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Integrated VPNs and fingerprints are now "all standard in Sailfish", he also noted.
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So the question is what could Sailfish offer that forked Android doesn't already?
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Founded by ex-Nokia employees to carry on the development of the MeeGo-derived operating system called Sailfish OS.Recent products of interest: Jolla has only ever put out one phone, back in 2013, to help build Sailfish OS. Why you should care: With Huawei's ongoing woes in the US, the focus is back on alternative mobile operating systems, and the Linux-based Sailfish OS is one of the best alternatives around.
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The Series C financing will be fully focused on Jolla's Sailfish OS licensing business.
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I'll typically pick up some coconut currant rolls, or accra, a crispy sailfish fritter.
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"We can now confirm that TRI has chosen to drop Android and use Jolla's Sailfish OS. Sailfish is now running perfectly on the Turing Phone and we have started the final OS software testing phase," the company announced on its Facebook page.
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So, in other words, a Russian, strategic 'Android alternative' is currently being built on Sailfish.
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Jolla's Sailfish OS rose from the ashes of Nokia and Intel's ill-fated collaboration, MeeGo.
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Spoiler alert: He didn't mention BlackBerry, Symbian OS, Tizen, Sailfish, Palm OS … or Windows Phone.
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Maybe partnerships can save Sailfish from becoming the next Firefox OS. But nah, probably not.
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Although a first Sailfish device is slated to be manufactured by the Group this September.
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Although Sailfish is an open source, alternative OS, you're not limited to open source apps.
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But Sailfish Point Golf Club on Hutchinson Island on Florida's east coast, did just that.
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One of these questions asks what the future of its Sailfish alternative mobile OS looks like.
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Saarnio emphasizes that the Russian version of the OS will not be a fork of Sailfish.
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Mi-Fone will also now be bringing multiple Sailfish devices to market in its local region.
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If I wanted to use Sailfish, I was going to have to get a different phone.
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Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Jason Koebler had a Nexus 5 that he had flashed with Sailfish.
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Also in jeopardy are the upcoming fishing and shellfish seasons, including stone crab, ballyhoo and sailfish.
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Today Jolla, the Finnish maker of an Android alternative called Sailfish, has announced v3 of its platform.
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All 1,000 handsets sold out yesterday, on the day the program was announced to the Sailfish community.
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So it doesn't need hundreds of millions of Sailfish devices to ship annually to turn a profit.
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Another licensing partner, Bolivian IT services company Jalasoft, has co-developed a Sailfish-powered smartphone called Accione.
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Although Pienimäki cautions there's still much work to be done to bring Sailfish to market in China.
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Although Sailfish looks to have won out as the preferred Android alternative for Russia at this point.
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"Sailfish OS runs exceptionally fast on the Turing," the company said in its email to preorder customers.
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Last week, we got a preview of the specs for the Sailfish with no hint of Marlin.
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A second announcement at today's event brings in another partner: ethical mobile device maker Fairphone said it has committed to offer Sailfish as an OS option to its buyers in future, although it will be offered alongside Android so it will depend on users to choose Sailfish over Android.
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Then in late 22017 signs of a breakthrough: Sailfish gained certification in Russia for government and corporate use.
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The customization for OMP's Russian version of Sailfish will include bringing in additional security features to the platform.
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There was clearly a demand for an affordable, alternative tablet, but Sailfish was ultimately unable to fill it.
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It seemed like a golden opportunity for Sailfish, which had its eye on Russian markets from the beginning.
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Might the Chinese government be a future user of Sailfish-powered devices built by the new local consortium?
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That puts the very phallic Sailfish in a distant second with only 20 percent of the female vote.
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The wall behind the checkout counter is decorated with a pair of sailfish, tours de force of taxidermy.
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Forget the typical seagoing décor often found in fish restaurants: running lights, ropes and nets, and taxidermied sailfish.
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But, it turns out when you get a bunch of sailfish into a group, the combined effect is deadly.
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Anyway, if you're swimming alone in a dark alley and a gang of sailfish surrounds you, you're probably toast.
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So the Sailfish maker's interest in diversifying into old school mobile handsets isn't as leftfield as it perhaps seems.
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"With Sailfish OS we have control of the implementation, while with Android it is the opposite," Lopez tells TechCrunch.
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Sailfish is independent and open offering, not controlled by large corporates, and thus optimal for local collaboration and customisation.
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The device makers had originally intended to use Android but switched to Sailfish, citing data security as the motivation.
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Fishermen report catching sailfish, black seabass, squid, and blue crab, all of which are native to much warmer climates.
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Jolla said Sailfish is now officially supported on more than a dozen devices, rising if you count community porting efforts.
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The company went public in 22016 and launched its flagship product, a Jolla-branded smartphone running Sailfish, the following year.
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This way, all the security protocols implemented on their Sailfish devices can be homegrown by the companies that use them.
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In its place will be Sailfish OS, an operating system developed by ex-Nokia engineers under the company name Jolla.
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HTC is probably going to manufacture two new Nexus devices this year, which Google has reportedly codenamed Marlin and Sailfish.
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A few seconds later, a sailfish burst from the water, its dark, muscular flanks so unexpected in the placid Pacific.
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"It's a huge sense of relief," said David BuShea, a managing partner at Sailfish Brewing Company in downtown Fort Pierce.
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The more side-dominance a sailfish demonstrated, the better it was at killing—presumably because it developed experience with that side.
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A limited group of first registrants will also be invited to attend an International Sailfish Community Event in Helsinki next month.
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The future for one of the few remaining alternative mobile OS platforms, Jolla's Sailfish OS, looks to be taking clearer shape.
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"For us it's very important that we have a solid hardware partner to offer Sailfish devices to the market," says Saarnio.
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Huawei reportedly knew it was over-reliant on Google's Android before the US-China trade war and considered alternatives like Sailfish.
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The only thing that remained to do before loading Sailfish onto the device was to find a SIM card that fit.
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In the ocean, sailfish are like pitchers and their sardine prey are the batters, except the batters are getting literally eaten alive.
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The Xperia X will be first in line to get support, and is being demoed by Jolla running Sailfish here at MWC.
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Jolla says it's aiming to release an official version of the Sailfish OS for a range of Sony Mobile's Xperia devices "soon".
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Despite Jolla's financial troubles, there was hope in the Sailfish developer community that the OS might live on as an open-source project.
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Now, Android Police is following up on its initial report with rumors of what we can expect to see built into the Sailfish.
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I liked Sailfish a lot—its interface was close enough to Android to be familiar, but had enough idiosyncrasies to make it distinct.
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"We completed a major pilot with our licensing customer, Sailfish China Consortium, in 2017-18," he says, giving an update on progress to date.
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Sailfish has also been chosen as the OS to power a forthcoming smartphone from Turing Robotics — another device targeting the security/pro-privacy space.
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Earlier this year, HTC was essentially confirmed as the maker of the next generation of Nexus phones — codenamed at Google as Marlin and Sailfish.
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Intex released its Aqua Fish phone earlier this year that ran Sailfish OS, and now, Russian company Plural is releasing its Oysters SF phone.
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Another 'smart featurephone' concept from #jolla running Sailfish OS aimed at the 22G LTE featurephone transition opportunity #mwc20173 #Finland Could run some Android apps pic.twitter.
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Even more ambitiously Jolla is also targeting China, where investment has been taken in to form a local consortium to develop a Chinese Sailfish ecosystem.
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In further comments in May last year Nikiforov described Sailfish as "almost an international company", noting that its shareholders include Finns, Russian and Chinese investors.
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Image: Android Police (not a press render)Another leak that reportedly shows the smaller Sailfish seems to support the existence of that back glass panel.
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" Turing justifies the bizarre switch by claiming that "the Turing Phone will still be able to run Android Apps on the Sailfish OS without issue.
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And while Saarnio says he remains confident that, over the longer term, consumers will also come around to seeking a privacy-focused alternative to Android, for now he concedes there is no mass market for Sailfish — and confirms there are currently no plans for Intex to do another Sailfish device (such as the one pictured above) — hence Jolla's pivot of focus to b2b2b and b2b2g licensing partnerships.
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Jolla also announced it will be making Sailfish available for the new Sony XperiaTM XA2, also announced at the show, via the Sony Open Device Program.
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M1/S1: There have also been leaks regarding two new Nexus devices, codenamed M1 (Marlin) and S1 (Sailfish), which are both reportedly being made by HTC.
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He reaches out to a company called Sailfish, an independent smartphone operating system out of Europe, but it doesn't respond to his emails until too late.
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The main target for Jolla's Sailfish sales pitch now is countries seeking a non-US-controlled mobile platform on which they can build a services strategy.
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We've had an idea that HTC would make two Nexus phones this year, which we've been referring to by their supposed Google codenames Marlin and Sailfish.
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To wit: Finland's Jolla, which makes its own mobile OS Sailfish and — previously — its own mobile devices too, has confirmed that its crowdfunded tablet is being canned.
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In early 2017, the company announced it had closed a deal with an anonymous Chinese consortium that would invest $250 million in developing Sailfish for the country.
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The hope there is also to move towards developing a Sailfish strategy for the region, says Saarnio, although he describes the project as at a "pilot phase".
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So our responsibility and role here is to make sure there is no forking of Sailfish here — but it happens exactly in collaboration together with our licensing customers.
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Sailfish is perhaps the last truly independent mobile operating system available—Firefox OS, Windows Phone, and Ubuntu Mobile have all bitten the dust in the past few years.
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Sailfish supports Android apps, which can be side-loaded onto the phone by downloading the app's APK file from the internet and loading it onto the phone manually.
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Speaking today at a press conference, Pienimäki added that v3 of the platform represents "a lot of work under the hood", building cumulatively on six years of Sailfish development.
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"Sailfish OS is already running fast on the Turing phone, and we are now working together to get all the needed software in place," added Saarnio in a statement.
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For now, it looks Sailfish will live to see another day and may even prove to be a serious third party competitor to Google and Apple in global markets.
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But Jolla's track record, especially with the misfiring tablet campaign bracketed by its two smartphones, leaves a sour taste for me and anyone involved in funding the Sailfish project.
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For the past week and a half I had spent most of my evenings trying to port an independent mobile OS called Sailfish onto my phone without any luck.
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Watch out, Newt (Image: AP)Sailfish, those speedy giant fish you usually see pinned to the wall at your favorite seafood shack, are the most badass fish in the ocean.
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At last year's MWC it also announced inking a licensing agreement with a Chinese consortium which it said planned to invest $250M in developing a Sailfish ecosystem for the country.
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Indeed, Jolla's indie vision for Sailfish OS is to support a whole shoal of differently branded, regionally flavored and independently minded (non-Google-led) ecosystems all swimming around in parallel.
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Scaling a royalty licensing business to hundreds of thousands of users is sums to "good business", , says Pienimäki, describing Jolla's business model for Sailfish as "practically a royalty per device".
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But Jolla can point to more seeds being sewn with the potential, with work, determination and patience, to sprout into another sizeable crop of Sailfish-powered devices down the line.
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Sailfish OS RUS is based on principles of participation and partnership, and we are actively recruiting partners and developer community members to take the initiative to new heights in Russia.
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Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler had a better idea: Why not try using an old LG Nexus he had flashed with a version of Sailfish, an independent mobile OS?
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ANDROID When I arrived home from the Verizon store with my Samsung Galaxy S210, I immediately set to work trying to figure out how to get Sailfish OS on it.
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In a study published yesterday in the journal Current Biology, scientists observed sailfishes to see how they hunted, and discovered that individual sailfish preferred hunting with one side of their face.
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HTC last manufactured the Nexus 9 for Google, which wasn't great, but its original Nexus One was actually good, so maybe Sailfish and Marlin will be the re-do HTC needs.
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The new device, which is set to come out in Russia later this summer, also runs Sailfish OS and is the result of a partnership between Plural and Jolla, Sailfish's creators.
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Back in November, for example, Jolla gained Russian certification for the Sailfish OS to be used for government and corporate use in the country — the first substantial win for the approach.
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Back in 23, its Sailfish OS promised to extend and develop the potential of Nokia's Harmattan interface, as best demonstrated by the MeeGo-powered N9, but it never really went anywhere.
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We've heard the phones might only differ by their screen sizes; Sailfish might have a 5-inch screen with 1080p display while Marlin could have a 5.5-inch QHD AMOLED one.
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Rumors about the two phones have circulated for a while; the smaller 5-inch one is said to be codenamed Sailfish, while the larger 5.5-inch model goes by Marlin internally.
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Where 4G feature phones are concerned, which means mobile phones priced around the $2503 mark, he said what makes Sailfish interesting is the platform is also capable of running "selected" Android apps.
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Today the Finnish company which develops and maintains the core code, with the aim of licensing it to others, announced Sailfish has achieved domestic certification in Russia for government and corporate use.
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Google is still expected to release two new phones codenamed "Sailfish" and "Marlin," but the phones are expect to be called Google Pixel and Pixel XL (703 inches and 5.5-inches respectively).
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The Information, citing sources, reported that Huawei's consumer head, Richard Yu, met with a group of cofounders from Jolla, a Finnish company that developed open-source mobile software firm Sailfish in 2016.
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Yet Helsinki-headquartered Jolla — one of those few remaining 'others' — isn't giving up pushing its Sailfish mobile OS, although it almost got snuffed out in a funding death valley back in late 2015.
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The Sailfish OS is developed by Jolla, a small Finnish company that was started in 2012 by a group of former Nokia developers who jumped ship just prior to Nokia's acquisition by Microsoft.
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The firm's first handset, the "ultra-secure" Turing Phone, was repeatedly delayed, and when it did finally reach consumers, came with a different operating system to the one originally advertised (Sailfish instead of Android).
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Over the past two years the company has rode the wave of anti-Google sentiment outside the US and inked deals with large foreign companies that want to turn Sailfish into a household name.
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The smaller phone, codenamed "Sailfish" and seen in the leaked image above, looks very much like the existing Nexus 5X with a fingerprint scanner on the back and same camera and front plate design.
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Sources familiar with the matter told The Information that Huawei's consumer head, Richard Yu, met cofounders from the company that developed Sailfish, a Finnish mobile operating system that is based on open source software.
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In short, that left people with three options: I opted to use Sailfish OS, which is why I found myself in a Verizon store in Bushwick downgrading my phone to a Samsung Galaxy S3.
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"What sets Sailfish OS apart from its competitors in the feature phone segment is the capability to do low-spec hardware configurations and still run selected Android apps," said CEO Sami Pienimäki in a statement.
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In recent years the Russian government has made moves to encourage the development of alternatives to the duopoly of US-dominated smartphone platforms, Android and Apple's iOS — flagging Sailfish as one possibility, along with Tizen.
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And today the first Sailfish device for the Russian market is also being announced by Jolla's local licensee there, Open Mobile Platform, with the device being made by Inoi and due to launch in April.
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Another announcement from Jolla today is it's adding support for Sony's Open Devices Program — meaning developers looking to run Sailfish on additional hardware will be able to choose from certain Sony Xperia devices in future.
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Finally, the experiment failed in the sense that I had to make compromises during the experiment, such as visiting websites hosted on Amazon Web Services or using an AOKP version of Android instead of Sailfish.
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One of the publicly announced projects is the community driven Fairphone project, but there are many other negotiations going on and Sailfish OS is gradually taking steps to become an OS used by multiple device vendors.
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Jolla says Sailfish was also recently added to the Unified Register of Russian Software for Computers and Databases — as a mobile OS platform approved for use in governmental and government controlled corporations' upcoming mobile device projects.
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"It's very important to people now that the community they live in respects the environment and takes care of it," said Kristen Cheskaty, a broker and a managing partner at Sailfish Point Realty in Stuart, Fla.
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Microsoft's Windows OS for mobile has a global marketshare in the region of just one per cent, while other alternatives — such as Jolla's Sailfish platform — have had an even harder time trying to carve out a niche.
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The first Sailfish device for India, the Intex Aqua Fish, is priced below $120 and due to arrive this year, although its launch has been delayed — and last month was being slated as arriving "in the coming months".
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The cherry on top is the OS this thing will allegedly be running: the "deep learning" Swordfish OS (based on Sailfish, a Linux-based OS which actually exists), with terms such as "running convolutional neural network" thrown in.
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After a switch to Sailfish OS in January of this year, the company began shipping its "ultra-secure" phone to early backers with the promise that an upgraded version with the Snapdragon 820 processor would follow this year.
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In June, Android Police suggested that Sailfish and Marlin would both feature quad-core Qualcomm processors, 4GB of RAM, and 12-megapixel cameras, with the only difference between the two being a larger screen and battery on Marlin.
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Alternative mobile OS maker, Jolla, whose Sailfish licensing business aims to compete with Google's Android platform by offering OEMs the ability to tailor the mobile platform to their needs, has closed out a $12 million Series C financing round.
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A few months before the first tablets were delivered, Jolla announced it was spinning off its hardware division into a separate company so it could focus on developing the Sailfish operating system, but pledged to continue developing its tablet.
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On Thursday, Jolla announced its second smartphone, the Jolla C, offering it as part of a new Sailfish Community Device Program for developers and fans — and it sold out its limited quantity of 1,000 units on the same day.
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Pretty much the only game in town is an indie OS called Sailfish, but this can be notoriously difficult to get onto US phones, which are generally locked down by mobile carriers to prevent modifications to the operating system.
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The developer program does risk raising a few eyebrows among Sailfish enthusiasts given that Jolla had to cancel its planned tablet — and is running an extended refund program for the vast majority of pre-orderers who won't get the slate.
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Political uncertainties around trade, high tech espionage risks and data privacy are translating into "opportunities" for the independent platform player — and helping to put wind in Jolla's sails long after the plucky Sailfish team quit their day jobs for startup life.
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Rostelecom is using the brand name 'Aurora OS' for Sailfish in the market which Pienimäki says is "exactly our strategy" — likening it to how Google's Android has been skinned with different user experiences by major OEMs such as Samsung and Huawei.
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What we then started was a joint R&D project with a local Russian organization to build an OS version of Sailfish into Russia so that government will have an independent OS but it's supported by our overall code base.
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Sailfish Point — a private 532-acre waterfront development with 520 low-rise homes, condominiums and townhouses — is bordered on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, the Fort Pierce Inlet to the north, and the Indian River Lagoon to the west.
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In 2015, Nikolay Nikiforov, the Russian Minister of Communications and Mass Communications, tweeted support for the "de-monopolization of the global IT ecosystem" and announced Russia's intention to provide grants to developers to move apps from Android to open source platforms like Sailfish.
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Mobile OS maker Jolla, who with its Android alternative Sailfish has been trying to carve out a niche for a third platform in the smartphone space for the past five years, has announced it's signed a new OEM partner: African OEM Mi-Fone.
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Although Samsung has recently embraced the Android modification community and there's plenty of documentation available for how to install Sailfish on a Samsung Galaxy S3, Verizon does everything in its power to make sure its customers can't get root access to its devices.
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It doesn't have the app selection of the Google Play Store of course, but it does have all the stock apps you're going to need—and in the current climate, you might be hearing a lot more about Sailfish OS in the future.
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So little to cheer Apple there, in terms of growth opportunity for premium priced devices, but potentially good news for alternative smartphone OS maker Jolla which last year inked a deal with Indian OEM Intex to get devices running its Sailfish platform into the market.
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Having piloted devices last year, Pienimäki says it's now moving to a full commercial deployment across the whole organization — which has around 300,000 employees (to give a sense of how many Sailfish powered devices could end up in the hands of state postal workers in Russia).
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For us it was too much to develop our own phone in an organization that is focused on software development, so I think this is a very good move from our side in that our developers can keep a proper device for Sailfish and use that.
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For those wanting another mobile OS flavor there's also a community port of Ubuntu (pictured running on Fairphone hardware below) and of Jolla's Sailfish OS. And you can also load an open source version of Android stripped of "all the Google stuff", as van Abel puts it.
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Mark Perry, the executive director at the Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart, who has consulted with the staff at Sailfish Point, said that the development's buffer zones are "good common practice to let the shoreline vegetation help absorb nutrients" that can be damaging to the environment.
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The latter's first Sailfish powered device, the Aqua Fish, had been slated to be launched in India by this month — although Jolla says now it is in the "final phases" of the project with Intex, and the device is "set to enter the Indian market during the coming months".
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When a local company purchased a license to use Sailfish on custom devices, for example, Jolla hands over all the code for the OS. If that business or government wants specific features integrated into the operating system, such as VPNs, Jolla's devs can spin that up for them.
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Earlier in August, Reuters reported that Huawei was considering using mobile software Aurora on devices in Russia, which is based on Sailfish OS.In May, Google severed ties with Huawei after President Donald Trump issued an executive order that effectively banned US firms from doing business with the Chinese company.
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Looking ahead and beyond mobile, Pienimäki suggests the automotive industry could be an interesting target for Sailfish in the future — though not literally plugging the platform into cars; but rather licensing its technologies where appropriate — arguing car makers are also keen to control the tech that's going into their cars.
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"Sailfish OS, as a non-American, open-source based, secure mobile OS platform, is naturally an interesting option for different players — currently the interest is stronger among corporate and governmental customers and partners, as our product offering is clearly focused on this segment," says Jolla co-founder and CEO Sami Pienimäki .
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We also have Android Police claiming to know, from sources, their Google codenames: Marlin and Sailfish (Pointing out, of course, that those words just happen to start with M and S). And last but not least, the ever-popular rogue mention of a device deep in some publicly available Android Open Source Project code.
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With the smartphone operating system market sewn up by Google's Android platform, which has a close to 90% share globally, leaving Apple's iOS a slender (but lucrative) premium top-slice, a little company called Jolla and its Linux-based Sailfish OS is a rare sight indeed: A self-styled 'independent alternative' that's still somehow in business.
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And in markets where target customers might not have their own extensive in-house IT capability to plug into Sailfish co-development work Pienimäki says it's offering a full solution — "a ready made package", together with partners, including device management, VPN, secure messaging and secure email — which he argues "can be still very lucrative business cases".
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Kicking off with footage of a whale shark, the largest fish in the sea, the relaxation-fest stitches together calming clips of stingrays dappled with refracted sunbeams, dolphin pods breaching over whitecaps, sailfish corralling cyclonic schools of fish, blooms of jellyfish drifting with the current, and a lone tortoise making its way across the pelagic expanse.
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In addition to the listed features, and the continued focus on security — with the aim of making Sailfish 3 "a solid option for various corporate solutions" — Jolla said it will provide "full support for regional infrastructures including steady releases & OS upgrades; services to establish independent R&D centers; local hosting; training; and a flexible feature set to support specific customer needs".
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A shift that is now de-emphasizing licensing to customers intending to sell Sailfish-powered devices to consumers, such as India's Intex (always a high bar given how dominant Android remains with smartphone users globally); and emphasizing licensing customers intending to sell devices to corporates and governments (who may have more immediate/specialize data-security and government service integration needs, for example).
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Jolla says the Chinese consortium will be aiming to invest $250M in developing a Sailfish ecosystem for the country, though it's not specifying exactly who is backing the consortia at this point, nor over what timeframe the investment will happen — beyond saying one of its early investors, a local private equity investor Shan Li, will take a "leading role" in building it up.
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But while a startup like Qwant waits to see what the next few months will bring — and how the landscape of the smartphone market might radically reconfigure in the face of sharply spiking political risk, a different European startup is hoping to catch some uplift: Finland-based Jolla steers development of a made-in-Europe Android alternative, called Sailfish OS. It's a very tiny player in a Google-dominated smartphone world.
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Just when you thought Finnish mobile OS maker Jolla had given up on making its own mobile hardware, given its recent financing troubles which led to it having to shutter a planned tablet, it gets back in the game — albeit with a limited run of 1,000 smartphones intended for developers and enthusiasts of its platform to test the latest and beta releases of its Sailfish OS. The community handset is called Jolla C, and has been priced at €169 — with shipping limited to Europe.
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"So that as we, hopefully, are able to extend this and come out to public with other similar set-ups in different countries those of course — eventually, if they come to such a fruition and maturity — will then likely as well have their own identities but still remain compatible with the global Sailfish OS." Telecoms trade press has reported that the Russian government plans to switch all circa 25M state officials to the platform by the end of 25 — under a project expected to cost RUB 20153 billion (~$22015BN).
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