Jolla Mobile plans to launch its first smartphone by the end of the year. It’s a 4.5 inch phone with a dual-score processor, 16GB of storage, and the Sailfish operating system. That’s a Linux-based operating system that rose out of the ashes of the discontinued MeeGo Linux project.
The company started taking pre-orders a few months ago, and has now announced that the first round of pre-orders are finished.
While Jolla isn’t officially saying exactly how many folks have ordered phones, there are a few hints. First, Jolla says it received pre-orders from 136 different countries. And second, in a statement to GigaOm and TechCrunch, the company points out that a production batch for this sort of device is usually about 50,000 units.
In other words, it’s likely that Jolla received about 50,000 orders and stopped taking pre-orders until it can gauge whether there’s enough demand to order another production run.
Folks who pre-ordered had to pony up 100 Euros (about $134 US) to reserve a spot in line. That money will go toward the final purchase price of 399 Euros (which is currently about $534) when the device goes on sale later this year.
Sailfish OS is is a Linux-based OS with a unique user interface, but it’ll also be able to run at least some Android apps. Jolla, meanwhile, is a company founded by folks who used to work at Nokia, one of the companies that had been investing time and resources into the MeeGo project before it met its demise.
BoloMKXXVIII:
A portion of the market, I suspect, are people who own(ed) Nokia N9/N900s and would like a more up to date phone.
$500 is quite a lot, especially compared to the Nexus 4, but I like Sailfish because the UI is great, especially with multitasking. Jolla also has no servers stateside, so that means using a Sailfish phone means the NSA won’t have access to your call records and personal data.
Unless a Verizon model comes out
Not thinking this one is a winner. Not even sure who the target audience would be.
this price is not attractive enough to get users & devs on board!
good luck with that!