[Feedback] Jolla C and Sailfish OS

asked 2016-08-18 00:28:47 +0200

Svartnar
81 ●2 ●2 ●3

Dear community, dear Jolla-Team,

after almost one month since I received my Jolla C, I think it's time to write down my experiences and give some feedback. Maybe I'm not the only one with some of the problems I will mention here so I thought it's best to share it here.

Please don't get my post wrong, though it will sound very negative, but it's not meant to be a "Jolla C/Sailfish OS bash" topic. I think the OS overall has a lot of potential and in some ways it's great! But with that in mind, it could be so much better for me. Maybe here and there a solution is already available but then I wasn't able to find one, so feel free to correct me. Any feedback from you guys is really appreciated!

So, here I go:

• LTE: It's not working here in Germany for me (provider O2), no problems with my iPhone. This was already mentioned by other users, so I hope this will be fixed soon.

• The tutorial is a good idea to learn the basics of the OS, but maybe this could be improved in future updates. How about splitting it into different lessons? So the implemented tutorial would be the "getting started" lesson and then other lessons are accessible through the tutorial app. I guess lots of people will use Android apps with their Sailfish device. For me it was no problem to get the notifications to work all the time, even when the app was not running, but I could imagine that most people won't find the setting to turn this on. So they will only think "it's not working everytime", miss notifications and maybe don't want to use the device anymore (and yes, I think that could be a huge problem for smartphone beginners that are using messengers etc).

• Sometimes the OS is using a lot of battery, even when flight mode is active. One day it dropped from 90 to 70% though the display was off the whole time and flight mode was on. And, what's really annoying for me, is the constant notifications about low battery when it's 10% or lower. I guess one notification at 10 and one at 5 % would be enough.

• The keyboard: I think the keyboard shows very good suggestions when you start typing. But there is a huge problem (or it's a bug?): when I type something and I don't use any suggestions everthing works fine, i.e. after a punctuation mark the new sentence will start with a capital letter. But not if I used a suggestion in the sentence. The punctuation mark will also not show right after the last letter when the last word was completed through a suggestion, no, it will leave a space there, which is very annoying, too. I have to press backspace, type the fullstop/exclamation mark etc, press the shift key so the next sentence will start with a capital letter. I'm using the German keyboard. And, what I really really miss, is a keyboard with the swype feature. This speeds up "typing" a lot and would be great to see in a future update (the android keyboard apps don't seem to be supported).

• Calendar: couldn't find a way to add a new calender, so I can only save events to my personal calender. No way to add another one for work etc.?

• Photos: is it possible to create a new album? I missed this feature and so it's no fun to use this app when you have a lot of photos saved to the internal storage (haven't tried a SD card yet).

• People: I know that one of the key features/design decisions was to make the OS with less buttons as possible, but to add a contact with different numbers takes too much time. Entering the number. Long press on it. Switch to "personal" or "work". Long press again. Switch to "mobile" or "home" etc. Phew... I think a drop down menu or something to choose from would be really helpful and speed things up.

• Android app support: is it possible to see if an app will work after an update? For example, I installed firefox through the aptoide appstore, version 46.0.1. Now they released an update to 48.0, but after that, the app won't work anymore. It always crashes when I try to open it. So I actually don't update my apps through aptoide cause I don't know if they will work after it.

• Media app: there seems to be problems with some ID3 tags. I had a lot of records showing up with "unknown album" and no chance to correct it by myself inside the app. The covers were missing, too.

• Browser: 1)I think the jolla browser has a lot of problems. For example, go to http://mobile.gamezone.de/News and open an article and start to scroll down. The browser will jump back to the news page. Strange. It also has a lot of problems with videos. Sometimes they won't start at all or they will stop every second automatically. So I don't use the Jolla device to watch videos right now. Another example is http://www.gamepro.de Just try to zoom in and open an article through the list on the left side. It won't work. The browser will always open a new tab, cause it thinks I tapped on the advertisement in the background! 2)I added most of the sites I visit regularly to my favorites, but everytime I open this view the keyboard shows up and therefore hides most of em. Is it possible to let me choose that the keyboard will only show when I want to type a URL, i.e. tap on the address bar? 3)If you open up a new tab the adress bar reads "search or type URL" or something like that. So I thought "cool, I can enter what I wan't to search and the browser will start a search at google, duckduckgo or whatever". But that's not the case. What a pity :-(

Again, please don't get this wrong, I really like Sailfish OS, it's something fresh, it's smooth, looks beautiful and I'm really enjoying the gesture based design most of the time. But as I said, it could be so much better for me. So this is just my experience so far and I'm really looking forward to the next OS updates and features Jolla will implement in the future. It's so good to have another mobile OS besides Android and iOS. So keep it up!

Kind regards

Andy