My Jolla is here - what's wrong with your smartphone?

In May I have bought a Jolla smartphone preordering option. In August Jolla sent me a nice T-Shirt showing “I am the first one”, some stickers and a letter saying “Thank you”. I was not sure if I really wanted to get a new smartphone - my Lumia 820 was running fine and I had a whole bunch of webOS-phones ready to run as backups. The mission Jolla was on was nevertheless fascinating, so I wanted to support them.

about Jolla

Jolla is a company made up by former Nokia employees - the ones that were responsible for creating the great Nokia N9 Meego-based smartphone. They teamed up to keep the idea of the N9 alive and build a new phone with a refined and gesture-based operating system - the ui is nearly build from scratch. If you want to know more about Jolla, there are tons of articles about their journey on the net.

But now back to the real story: The more details about the Jolla phone became available, the more I knew I would get the phone once it was ready to be shipped.

Ordered. Paid. Shipped! FedEx delivered the phone on the 23rd of December - what a great christmas present! I swapped the SIM from Lumia to Jolla the same day and used it as my main device since then.

software

SailfishOS - the operating system powering the Jolla - is labeled as beta release but already gives you a great user experience. Swiping feels natural after only a few hours. Today, I am having trouble to use other devices like my HP Touchpad or my Lumia. Pushing buttons feels unintuitive in most situations now…

The ui is great, the most important applications for my personal use are already available although there are some limitations. For overcoming those, Jolla has built-in compatibility for Android applications. You can have full terminal access to the device and do whatever you think is best for optimizing the underlying Linux. Jolla developers are also working hard to improve the system - after only one month of public availability, Sailfish has already seen two major updates. The community around the product is very active - you can get help on Twitter, irc and a few days ago, Jolla has opened a community site at together.jolla.com where users can ask and answer questions - there are many users and many excellent answers after only a short time the platform is online.

hardware

The hardware is designed with users in mind - it is not about specs, there are many devices more powerful with better screen resolution. The phone feels great when holding it, it is light and has a good grip thanks to the backcover, which Jolla calls the other half. The battery lasts very long for a device of this class: With my normal daily usage - Twitter, Whatsapp, some surfing, emails and few phone calls - my Lumia (as well as my Pre3 before that) had to be charged every day - many times even more than that. After six days with my Jolla, I had it on the charger only 3 times. I could go more than two days with a fully charged phone. I need to see how this evolves, but to date, this is amazing!

an awesome phone - go and buy yours!

After the first week of usage, I can only recommend the Jolla to all of you. Sure, there are only few native apps to date, but Android apps can jump in until those applications are in the Jolla harbour - the Sailfish app store. I think Jolla is not only about technology, but more about a community movement to create a true alternative to the known players in the smartphone market. If Jolla can succeed in terms of staying in the market for some years to come, there might be a European company that can bring true innovation (especially if they continue working as passionate as they did until now) once again.

So now you should really hop over to the Jolla Store and get yours!