Finnish smartphone company Jolla is now selling the first phone to ship with Sailfish OS throughout the European Union, Switzerland, and Norway. Up until now it had only been available to customers in Finland.

Jolla’s Sailfish software is based on the open source MeeGo operating system that had been developed, and then largely abandoned by Nokia, Intel, and others. Sailfish keeps the dream alive — but it also adds support for Android apps, which means that even though there’s not a huge ecosystem of third party apps designed to run on Sailfish, you can still run thousands of existing mobile apps on a Jolla phone.

Jolla Sailfish smartphone

The handset sells for €399, or about $545 US. That buys you a phone with a 4.5 inch, 960 x 540 pixel display, a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It has an 8MP rear camera and 2MP front camera, and supports GSM, 3G, and 4G LTE networks.

The specs are decent, but not spectacular — but it’s the software that makes the phone special. Android and iOS pretty much dominate the smartphone space these days, with BlackBerry and Windows Phone software bringing up the rear. A number of companies are trying to show that there’s room for more options — such as Ubuntu, Firefox OS, Tizen, or Sailfish.

Just bringing a phone to market and distributing it throughout much of a continent is a pretty big deal — it’s something Ubuntu attempted to raise funds for, and failed. While it’s not clear if Sailfish will become the next Android, at least it looks like it Jolla might have what it takes to make sure it’s not another GridOS.

via CNET

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,498 other subscribers

4 replies on “Jolla expands Sailfish smartphone sales in Europe”

  1. I’m eyeing Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch. I really like how under the hood you have a Linux system with most of the available utilities and filesystem files you typically find on desktop Linux distributions. I have several Bash scripts that automate things for me and rely on several utilites found on most Linux distros. It’d be great to be able to just run them (the relevant ones) on my smartphone.

    I can also make use of systemd or upstart to trigger scripts kind of like how I use Tasker on my Droid 4. Tasker’s nice but it’s scripting capabilities are too limited and/or too cumbersome.

    1. Same hear. I hope at least one of these OS’s become stable and useful as a smartphone OS so I can also use them as Linux UMPCs. It’d be nice if a terminal friendly slider comes out with one of these OS’s.

  2. I’m looking for a mobile OS that brings convergence, so I can use it as a desktop when hooked to a monitor. Right now that looks like Ubuntu.

Comments are closed.