Jolla Puts More Sailfish OS Smartphones On Sale

Jolla has made another batch of brand new Sailfish OS-powered Jolla smartphones available for order in Europe. It promises to fulfill existing orders before Christmas.

The Finnish smartphone manufacturer says the handsets will be delivered to the European Union nations, Switzerland and Norway – the first Jolla devices on general sale, following the completion of two successful pre-order campaigns.

“Sales of Jolla smartphones are off to a great start and it is time to move on to the next phase by offering a new batch of Jolla smartphones to new customers across Europe,” says Tomi Pienimäki, CEO of Jolla.

Jolla smartphone

The Jolla smartphone costs €399 without a contact and boasts a 4.5-inch display, 1.4GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor, 1GB RAM, 16GB of storage, LTE support an eight megapixel rear camera. It comes pre-installed with the Yandex app store and Nokia’s Here Maps service.

Pre-orders started in May and were accepted from 136 different countries, with the first handsets shipping last month. Jolla has apologised for technical issues that have prevented some customers from receiving their phones.

“After solving some technical logistics issues all the shipments to pre-order customers in the EU will be shipped by Christmas,” adds Pienimäki. “We want to thank all of our valued customers for their great support and patience to make this happen.”

Any Jolla smartphones ordered today will take two to four weeks to deliver, and will start shipping in January.

User cooperation

Jolla was formed by a number of Nokia alumni after the Lumia manufacturer abandoned the open source MeeGo platform in favour of Windows Phone. Its Sailfish OS is a continuation of the MeeGo project and boasts full compatibility with Android.

The first handset runs a beta version of Sailfish OS, and Jolla has said it wants early adopters to assist with the future development of the platform. To this end, it has opened a portal where customers can discuss and vote on which features they want to see included.

“We launched Jolla with Sailfish OS Beta to put the product in the hands of real customers as soon as possible,” explains Pienimäki. “We have received a lot of valuable feedback, for example, regarding power management and most wanted features, and we are reacting quickly. We have already released two updates for the OS and are expecting to rapidly improve the capabilities with frequent over the air updates.”

Sailfish OS is one of a number of open source mobile operating systems looking to make an impact on the smartphone market. Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu Mobile are all at various stages of development, hoping to offer an alternative to the likes of Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

How much do you know about Linux? Take our quiz!