Saturday, July 7 was a big day for Nokia N9 owners and MeeGo sympathisers. Already on Friday, a former Nokia MeeGo product manager announced "interesting news tomorrow for MeeGo". The eagerly awaited news has the name "Jolla". The exciting and courageous mission of Jolla is to develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones produced by professionals who created Nokia N9.
Nokia N9 is the only smartphone running Nokia's homemade platform MeeGo Harmattan. What started with an promising alliance between Nokia and Intel, ended with CEO Stephen Elop and the introduction of a Nokia-Microsoft cooperation.
The innovative and refreshing MeeGo Harmattan platform, running on the stunning looking Nokia N9, posed a threat to the rather unpopular Windows Phone system and therefore got "killed" by Nokia's own management.
The disappointment among Nokia fans was huge and MeeGo's future hasn't been looking very bright since then. However, Nokia N9 has never been a dead platform and enjoyed great support by a loyal community and Nokia professionals who worked on and developed that device. Despite lacking support of big software developers and Nokia itself, the only one year old N9 already enjoys cult-status - especially because it is the first but also last device of it's kind.
MeeGo kept alive by Jolla Ltd.
Jussi Hurmola and Marc Dillon, both former Nokia employees, announced in a press release that they have been working on a MeeGo-successor called Jolla since the end of 2011.
A new smartphone should already be presented this year - the hardware manufacturing will be done by an external partner, whose name isn't mentioned. The reactions on the Jolla announcement were very positive and got picked up by media all around the world. Within only one day, Jolla's Twitter account got around 5000 new followers - an impressive number. Jolla was founded within the Nokias Bridge program, which Nokia created to support the redundant workers re-employment and entrepreneurship.
Jolla's CEO Jussi Hurmola describes Nokia N9 as the world's best smartphone which deserves to be continued and leads a team composed of directors and designers who used to work on the Nokia N9 project. With the help of international private investors and partners, Jolla Ltd "will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones" and is "aggressively hiring the top MeeGo talents to contribute to the next generation smartphone production".
"Nokia created something wonderful - the world's best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story." - Source
MeeGo is not MeeGo Harmattan
Nokia N9 doesn't run the original, by the Linux Foundation hosted MeeGo. Nokia alternated the system and mixed it up with the in-house made Maemo. Therefore the platform is unofficially also called Maemo6 as a successor of Maemo5 running on Nokia N900. Therefore Jolla can't keep supporting MeeGo Harmattan since it's protected by Nokia.
Jolla's platform has evolved from MeeGo OS using Mer Core and Qt combined with Jolla technology and it's own new user interface. We can expect though that Jolla's team sets value on giving developers a possibility to easily transform N9 applications to the new platform - especially since both platforms use Qt framework. But Jussi Hurmola didn't specify so far if the new platform takes advantages of existing N9 applications or creates a completely new and own eco-system. Next to that there would be possibilities with an application compatibility layer (ACL).
Furthermore it's possible that some appreciated features of MeeGo Harmattan (hopefully something similar to Swipe) will be retained, since Nokia seemed to have shared some of their patents with people leaving the company.
Exciting future
The announcement of Jolla brings new life into the Nokia N9 community and is also a future for our website. It's amazing to hear that the knowledge which created the N9 isn't lost and keeps living on within a new company. We also want to highlight that Jolla already answered many questions (Twitter) to potential users/developers and is really seeking the contact to them and the hole community - they also follow us on Twitter what we appreciate a lot.
You can follow Jolla on Twitter or Facebook.
I hope to see some amazing things from these guys :D they defo got my support
ReplyDeleteThis is simply amazing. I was wondering what phone I should get after N9 and didn't find any answer to my question - now there is one! Good luck Jolla! :D :D
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to see a Jolla smartphone! =)
ReplyDeleteJust awesome!
ReplyDeleteGreat article and of inspiring news.
ReplyDeleteit is remarkable at the level of excitement that Jolla has caused in just four days. It will be very interesting to see more information about their development path. Design, hardware and hw partners will be as interesting as the UI.
MeeGo Harmattan compatibility and porting to/from Jolla's Mer is a different matter. Thinking aloud here; I wonder how many Maemo5 apps got ported to Maemo6/harmattan.
I agree with John. Great article which sums up everything important about Jolla. It's very unique that in days like these a company comes up and announces hard- & software. I really wonder what we'll get - but those people are very experienced, already released final products and really love their job. The mobile phone market is a hard business, full of evil processes (lawsuits, user-controling, destruction of open-source) and Jolla can hopefully bring some color into this "dark world".
ReplyDeleteThe app compatibility: I hope that porting apps will be easy. But it was sometimes very disappointing to see how many Maemo5 fans initially were against Nokia N9 and refused to port applications or be open to the new system (just have a look at TMO forum). So I hope that with Jolla everyone realizes that the open-source/Maemo/MeeGo/Mer community has to stand together.
For now I enjoy the wonderful Nokia N9, hoping that this device was the start for a series of new MeeGo based smart phones.
Awesome news! I will use my n9 till it breaks, but i have been thinking of which phone I should get then. An android or iphone would be unimaginable after using the awesome Meego OS so the answer to my question was a new nokia n9. It looks like I will use a Jolla phone in a couple of years :)
ReplyDeleteme too hehehehe :-)
DeleteWhere the heck is this pre-order button? I wanna order two already.
Delete@LastExit-N9: Haha, I like that comment a lot :)
Delete@John Norris & DiAlex: Thank you for your kind words. I'm very excited to observe the development of Jolla! :)
ReplyDelete