Jolla Preview

Available now
20th May 2013

The Jolla project was born out of Nokia's failed MeeGo project (that led to the very rare Nokia N9). After Nokia dumped that particular platform, some of the engineers left to form their own company called Jolla (pronounced "Yo-la"), and developed an OS called Sailfish based on the MeeGo platform.

After a great deal of work and some teasing, Jolla have announced that they are ready to take pre-orders for their new smartphone, called simply Jolla for delivery by the end of the year. But does the world really need another smartphone operating system?

We don't know much about the Jolla's hardware except that there is a 4.5" display, 8 megapixel camera, a dual-core CPU, 16GB of onboard storage plus a microSD slot and the Jolla is LTE capable. The back of the phone is replaceable (and the Jolla will automatically adapt its colour scheme to match) and the battery is user replaceable too.

Jolla say that the handset can run Android apps, although we don't know exactly how compatible it is bearing in mind that it must be running some sort of emulator. In any case, it will certainly give the Jolla a leg-up at launch.

Sailfish is a bit different from Android and iOS in that it makes extensive use of gestures and swiping, something that seemed to work pretty well on the N9. It's worth remembering though that Jolla isn't the only project adapting code from MeeGo, as the Samsung-led Tizen project is also working towards a handset sometime this year

The Jolla itself is priced at €399 and is ready to pre-order now from the Jolla website if you are looking for something a little bit different from a mainstream device.