Jolla

This article is about the company. For the smartphone, see Jolla (mobile phone). For the tablet, see Jolla Tablet. For other uses, see Jolla (disambiguation).
Jolla Oy
Private
Industry Mobile devices, Consumer Electronics/Devices
Predecessor MeeGo team from Nokia
Founded Pirkkala, Finland (March 29, 2011 (2011-03-29))
Founder
  • Sami Pienimäki
  • Jussi Hurmola
  • Marc Dillon
  • Stefano Mosconi
  • Antti Saarnio
Headquarters Helsinki, Finland
Area served
 Worldwide
Key people
Products Smartphones with Linux-based Sailfish OS continuing the previous work of the MeeGo project
Number of employees
 150 developers
Website jolla.com, blog.jolla.com

Jolla Oy[1] (sometimes referred to as Jolla Ltd.) is a technology company. It is vendor of mobile devices[2] as well as the Sailfish OS. [3] Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Jolla has research and development (R&D) office in Helsinki and Tampere and also an R&D department and office in Cyberport Hong Kong, and they are establishing R&D and operations in China.

Jolla, in Finnish, is pronounced 'yolla'.The company name, means dinghy (a small agile boat) in Finnish. It can also be recognized as an ironic joke about the "burning platform memo" which contained suggestion "jump into the cold sea water" or "burn with platform" considering Nokia business. It has "accidentally leaked" from former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in February 2011.[4]

History

Nokia, after rapidly losing marketshare in the smartphone market, decided to create a new operating system based on Linux, naming it Maemo. After merging with Intel's Moblin project (also an open source Linux system), the project was renamed MeeGo.

In October 2011, some of the MeeGo team left Nokia to form Jolla, utilizing funding from Nokia's "Bridge" program which helps establish and support start-up companies formed by ex-Nokia employees.[5][6][7]

Nokia paid employees leaving the company €25,000, but had not given any rights to patents or other intellectual property to Jolla. While Jolla's Sailfish OS can be considered a direct successor to Nokia and Intel's MeeGo and the N9 mobile phone, only its software is based on the open-sourced components of MeeGo, while the closed-source user interface design for all future devices had to be developed from scratch.

Jolla went public on 6 July 2012, announcing its intention to develop new smartphones which utilized a gesture-oriented user interface. They named their operating system "Sailfish", which is a result of Mer and includes a gesture-based user interface developed using the Qt, QML and HTML5, as did Nokia's N9.

Jolla co-operate with others to grow their application's and MeeGo ecosystem.[8] Jolla announced on 17 September 2013 that their phone will be capable of running most Android applications, though without direct access to the Google Play Store.[9]

On 7 July 2015, Jolla announced that it would spin out its hardware operations to a brand new company established for this purposes and will continue to focus on current activities as a developer and licensor of the Sailfish OS.[10]

In November 2015, Jolla had to lay off half of its employees due to financial problems. On December 21, 2015, Jolla announced that they would be "shipping an additional small batch of the Jolla Tablet to early backers during early 2016" but "all of our backers will not get a Jolla Tablet".[11]

Products

Hardware

Marc Dillon showing the Jolla's phone. The event was titled Jolla Love Day at KlausK, Helsinki.[12]
People waiting to get hands on with Jolla's phone.
Jolla's mobile phone

Ecosystem

One of elements of the ecosystem is the Harbour.Jolla.com site, which is devoted for submitting, managing and selling applications at the Jolla Store. Consumers can install available software directly on their Sailfish devices.

Software can be submitted on a free or commercial basis, utilizing either the Sailfish OS or Android OS applications.

Currently, the Jolla Harbour and Jolla Store support only free applications. The subsystem for payments is under active development to avoid problems with monetizing software.

For developers and software enthusiasts, sailfishos.org collects and publishes here[13] an online compendium of knowledge, links and instructions on:[14]

Software

Sailfish OS is able to run:

All Android software available from the Jolla "harbour" store were tested with a real Jolla device. Android or MeeGo or Linux software can be downloaded from any 3rd party e.g. Google store or any other source, due to Sailfish OS openness policy. From launch, this has given the devices access to a large number of applications, which was estimated above 0.5M unique software pieces at the time of the device launch.

Because Sailfish is Linux and use Qt and Sailfish SDK is in Qt, it is possible to port applications without significant effort, including the following sources:

For easy porting and development the Sailfish SDK emulates the whole device, the OS and its behaviour using isolated virtual machine on host computer e.g. Windows or Mac or Linux. As it is fully emulated, not simulated, and Jolla strongly declares it is possible to test behaviour like with real device when using Jolla SDK developer's environment. So it is possible to develop and test software without using a Jolla device.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Jolla Oy", Business Information System (the Finnish National Board of Patents and Registration, and the Finnish Tax Administration), retrieved July 18, 2012
  2. ↑ JollaSuomi (21 November 2012). "Jolla's Sailfish OS is also for tablets and smart TV's. ;)" (Tweet). Retrieved 2013-07-10.
  3. ↑ Jolla at LinkedIn. "LinkedIn". LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Retrieved 10 November 2013.
  4. ↑ Zieler, Chris. "Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally honest 'burning platform' memo? (update: it's real!)". engadget.com. Retrieved 10 December 2012.
  5. ↑ "Many former Nokia employees start businesses of their own", Helsingin Sanomat
  6. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid. "Nokia Bridge: Nokia’s Incubator Gives Departing Employees €25k And More To Pursue Ideas That Nokia Has Not". techcrunch.com. techcrunch.com. Retrieved 7 June 2013.
  7. ↑ Tung, Liam. "Inside Nokia Bridge: How Nokia funds ex-employees' new start-ups". zdnet.com. © 2013 CBS Interactive. Retrieved 7 June 2013.
  8. ↑ Davies, Chris. "Jolla Mobile CEO: "MeeGo is not dead"". slashgear.com. SlashGear. Retrieved 19 August 2012.
  9. ↑ "Jolla Sailfish OS Andriod Support". The Register. Retrieved 15 December 2013.
  10. ↑ "Mobile Maker Jolla Splits In Two, With Sailfish OS Its First Order Of Business". TechCrunch. Retrieved 8 July 2015.
  11. ↑ ""New Year's Greetings from Jolla"".
  12. ↑ "MoMo Helsinki – May 20th – Featuring Jolla Love Day". Mobile Monday. Retrieved 2014-02-18.
  13. ↑ "Porting/Harmattan". SailfishOS. Retrieved 2014-02-18.
  14. ↑ "Porting/Harmattan". sailfishos.org/wiki/. https://sailfishos.org/. Retrieved 25 January 2014. External link in |publisher= (help)

External links

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