User reports - Sailfish X

answered 2017-10-12 18:02:19 +0200

MystIsland
1061 ●14 ●20 ●22

updated 2017-10-12 18:04:55 +0200

My two cents after one day of usage... I did a backup on my Jolla1 and moved it on the SD card to the Xperia and restored from that.

First the negative stuff:

• The driver-stuff related to the flashing and the instructions were not totally clear. When I finally got to run the flashing script itself, it was fast and straight-forward.
• Lot of digital noise on headphone output (might depend on headphone impedance) during audio playback
• All MMS photos are missing: the messages' texts are present but the photos are not there (more of an issue of the backup/restore-functionality than the phone)
• Swiping from the edges seems to be touchier than on Jolla1, I have needed to repeat the swipe-from right couple of times
• As mentioned in the release notes: "Issues with video playback and video recording", ie. low framerate (YouTube works ok-ish in browser, YTPlayer is worse)
• So far all my phone calls have ended with three-tone-error-beep and a network error (didn't make note of the error) after ending the call

When I restart the phone, it shows a message about the phone being unlocked and cannot be trusted. Is this going to show on every boot? Also the white-background Sony logo, which feels like full-brightness is an eye-killer if you do it at night!

The good stuff:

• The display is gorgeus!

• Haven't done any serious testing on the camera yet, but it feels so much better after having used Jolla1... Here are two snaps I took today (camera on 4:3 (13 Mpx) setting): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nlf694pz17a81h2/AAA2Fd9NsUX31FHHGmfTYczna?dl=0 All I have done to these was to remove the GPS information, no other editing.

• UI feels smooth and responsive, also browser works much faster
• Battery life feels better than my Jolla1's (that had a replaced battery), not bad for a first release and hopefully it will get more optimized in the future.

So far so good. I am still installing all my previous apps and probably some will have bugs, but so far nothing game-stopping.

answered 2017-10-14 18:24:40 +0200

pasik
1292 ●33 ●46 ●47

Camera picture quality is far away from original Sony camera app. Color quality is good but photos are mostly blurred. Quality like Jolla C/Aquafish at the moment.

answered 2017-10-15 16:39:12 +0200

edawg
171 ●1 ●1 ●3

Well, due to the rather poor intex aquafish hardware I took the risk and bought the Xperia X and SailfishX. Everything basically went fine and I successfully installed SailfishX onto the device. I have to admit that some instructions are not too clear in the unlocking and the flashing process. I was shortly confused about, should I download and install the huge Android SDK or should I trust the comment in the instructions that you can also use the fastboot app from inside the SailfishX directory, that was created during extracting. Common sense made me do the right choices but I am a bit more the tech guy than others. For "normal users" especially the unlocking is most probably not doable. So please improve it Jolla.

Positive: Everything works as promised and I am very happy having Sailfish on a proper hardware.

Negative: Well basically my fault that I missed to read before buying that tethering (wifi hotspot) is not working. This is a must for me. So please Jolla, try to implement it as soon as you can.

answered 2017-10-15 17:00:09 +0200

veritanuda
611 ●14 ●17 ●21

updated 2017-10-16 00:02:03 +0200

On the whole I am rather impressed but not totally happy. ;)

A bit of background. I have been a big supporter of Jolla and their vision and was one of the fateful few who backed the Jolla Tablet hoping to experience my first real taste of a polished Sailfish install. Alas and alack that did not come to pass. However, I did find one guy who was porting sailfish to all sorts of devices including my old HTC Desire Z. I loved that phone and really miss both the trackball and the keyboard. sniff I liked what I saw on my HTC and if is was not for the terrible batery life and the laggy nature of it I would have continued to use it.

Fast forward to just over a fortnight ago and I get an email form Jolla saying they are refunding the rest of my money and if I wanted to I could put that to a Sailfish X voucher, or just give it back to development. I chose the former and sprung for a 2nd hand Xperia X and waited for it to be released.

Now comes the real feedback.

So I did , out of curiosity, apply all the updates I could to the Xperia OTA. It was a tiresome procedure and downloads were REALLY slow (200k/s) and kept stopping for some reason saying not connected to the internet. I ended up having to hold the phone in my left hand above my head like a waiter for about 15 mins each time. But I persevered and finally I was updated to Android 7.1. Great I thought, now i can flash TWRP and get ready for Sailfish install.

Unlocking the bootloader was painless. Go to Sony website. Put in your IMEI and email , they send you the code to unlock the bootloader with fastboot oem unlock <code>

You can tell it is unlocked because an ugly great warning triangle and bogus warning about "Your device is unlocked and cannot be trusted" nonsense of course because I could flash my own keys to the same DRM as they did and have it secure as I want it to be.

But I digress. The first flash did not go well at all, because even though I updated to the latest OTA build it was not the latest build needed to flash Sailfish. version 34.3 or greater is needed and so I spend the next day trying to upgrade my phone without having to resort to Windows (yuk). That being said once I did use flashtool to flash the latest firmware the supplied flash script worked flawlessly.

So what is it like to use Sailfish. Well the first thing that struck me was that the boot is hyper fast, I am not sure if that is hiding behind that ghastly white Sony splash or not but soon as that is gone poof Sailfish starts. I was used to the setup procedure and the tutorial from my HTC and I have to say they are very nice, just a pain not being able to skip it. Then I was into my experience proper. First thing it prompted me to do was install the optional apps. Android Predictive text etc etc. Like others those download failed a few times but i rebooted my phone and tried again and they all seemed to work.

The Jolla store is nice and simple and installing apps was easy. First apps i installed though where File Browser, F-Droid and the Android version of QR scanner as the native Jolla one was horrendously slow and did not seem to work properly. Android one works fine though. So hmmm.

I noticed however that the Sailfish warehouse appwas not installed. Which I found odd as I had used that on my HTC because Jolla store was incomplete at the time. The warehouse gives you access to a much wider range of apps but at a much more variable quality. Still even between these two repos there are gaps in Sailfish's functionality.

So apps I have had to install because there are no Sailfish equivalent even if there are Linux varieties are:

• OpenKeyChain Hands down the best way to manage GPG keys or search for them

• K9Mail The only usable and functional email client that can send and receive GPG email.

• Fennec a developer build based on the latest Firefox Browser releases

• Conversations In fact there seem to be NO decent XMPP clients in either store or warehouse. I am shocked.

Annoyances so far.

• GPS appears not to work. I have tried various apps using D-bus or not and never seems it is enabled. Correction. Does work after all.

• Camera is cumbersome to start up. Though fast enough when taking pictures. A quick launch facility should be added when you press the photo button twice. And be available from the lockscreen. Pictures are not too shabby though

• No in built way to browse the network. This is what Linux excels at. No SFTP, no WebDAV, no SMB or NFS shares nothing. Not happy about that at all.

• No easy way to add Tinc as a VPN, though I am working on trying to ge the Android app to work.

• Apps seem to be arranged in installed order with no way to change that. Some sort options or grouping should be available.

• No Advanced Network settings. Suppose i don't want DHCP or need to set up a proxy?

• Backups are not working properly. Seems to tar stuff up but then does not restore it properly,

• Finger print reader not working. Not essential but handy sometimes.

• NFC sensor is not working. Pity but drivers no doubt.

• No Nextcloud account support. A bummer to say the least but should be fixed in future updates I hope.

• in FingerTerm or ThumbTerm there is no way to copy selected text and be able to paste it into another app. Not very helpful for developer needs.

Now to the good stuff.

• Boots super fast like I said. Shuts down quickly too. Very impressed by that.

• The gestures are so damn intuitive I keep accidentally trying to swipe my android phone when I go back to using it.

• The UI is very responsive with a lot less bling than you are used to. Sounds are discrete and sparse.

• Battery life is exceptional, granted I am not using a cellular network only wifi atm, But even so I play with it for over a day and it has still more 60% battery left. I am excited to see if i can get same performance even with 3/4G turned on.

• Developer mode is quite easy to enable and secure to use. Using USBNet and ssh is a genius move.

• I have yet to try updating OTA so I am looking forward to seeing how smooth that goes.

• Android apps work pretty well for the most part. Some just die horribly, some are buggy but most like Fennec F-droid etc all work very well and at near native speeds.

All in all a positive experience on a not too horrible phone. I am looking forward to the iterative changes that come from some furious development now we have a sizable userbase to test against.

Good job Jolla!

answered 2017-10-13 20:45:29 +0200

MaxT
506 ●11 ●18 ●25

updated 2017-10-16 23:16:48 +0200

The performace of Xperia X with Sailfish OS is really good. Flashing was quite tricky (installing windows drivers, Android SDK), but now the phone is working like a charme. I am very happy to have a SailfishOS phone back. My Jolla C battery broke and I had to use Android for three months.

answered 2017-10-11 21:05:58 +0200

Dietmar
618 ●13 ●21 ●20

updated 2017-10-11 22:07:25 +0200

For unlocking the Sony bootloader, the installation instructions just refer to the Sony instructions. These state that installing the SDK is sufficient for unlocking, but unfortunately they will only tell you how to do so for the full multi-GB installation of Android Studio. I would have expected step-by-step instructions from Jolla for unlocking.

So, to answer "How much time is needed to flash the phone?": very much including preparations; the flashing itself is around a minute

answered 2017-10-13 15:09:30 +0200

MariusP
401 ●6 ●11 ●15

updated 2017-10-13 15:16:15 +0200

The overall performance is good (better than on JollaC), although AIDA 64 shows only the first 4 cores running.

Bluetooth is working the same as on JollaC (successfully paired with JollaC, and with JBL headphones - for music, and calling; the answer/hang up from headphones button works, volume buttons also work).

Camera resolutions with default settings: main: 5312 × 2988 pixels = 16 MP frontal: 3120 × 4160 pixels = 14 MP Sample photos can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bradoth2nr67llc/AABO_oUzyMb2o4ZTT36UERKTa?dl=0

answered 2017-10-13 22:05:11 +0200

tmy
1853 ●27 ●36 ●39

updated 2017-10-31 18:31:35 +0200

1. Flashing process took me a few hours, including all the downloads (android sdk, images, emma tool, drivers), which is a lot more than I anticipated. The instructions provided by Jolla and Sony were not very good. At the end I hadn't even used the infamous Emma tool, so not sure if I did everything right...

2. The camera. So far I have only taken few photos indoors. Didn't get a wow effect so far (comparing with Jolla 1 camera). Have to experiment a bit more...

3. Battery life seems pretty good. Today I have used it quite heavily: 60 minutes driving with Waze (screen on), occasional use during work, and hardly left my hands after I got home :) 35% of battery left now (at 21:55).

4. Performance is amazing! I can actually have multiple Android apps, the browser and a lot of native apps on all at once without out of memory incidents. The browser loads pages quick enough (with Jolla 1 it was abysmally slow). Scrolling some pages with the browser seems a bit stuttering sometimes.

5. Apps are working well. All the apps I had in Jolla 1 have been installed successfully, with the exception of Meerun, which seems to install but does not start.

6. Some features are still missing, such as compass and wifi hotspot. It would be nice to know their roadmap.

Overall I'm very pleased with the phone!

EDIT (2.1.3.7): The camera focus seems to be greatly improved.

answered 2017-10-14 00:04:57 +0200

kultsinuppeli
491 ●6 ●10 ●11

updated 2017-10-15 14:57:36 +0200

I jumped to SailfishX directly from Jolla1, and wow, is there ever a difference.

Bear in mind this is based on 24 hours of use.

The speed and snappiness compared to Jolla 1 is amazing. I haven't tried bluetooth yet. Battery life seems good (100% -> 80% with some amount of use, spotify, browsing, whatsapp etc.) The screen is awesome. As most people, a backup -> restore brought in most of the things.

So far I'm all smiles about it.

The update process was longer and more convoluted than I thought. That's mostly due to the Sony part though. After you wade through the Sony phone unlock, its running one script, and that's it.

Edit: Tried to pair the phone with bluetooth speakers and my Honda. Both worked nicely and I didn't encounter any issues.

answered 2017-10-13 22:31:08 +0200

olli
128 ●2 ●6 ●9

updated 2017-10-13 22:55:43 +0200

i have been wery pleased. It's like Jolla C but with some serious horsepower under the hood. Hopefully Jolla will continue the good work with Sailfish X and we see many improvements with coming updates. This is the right direction (or course if you will)

edit: Some whiskey and only answered 1 of 4 guestions.

So bluetooth is working good enough for me. I managed to connect pebble and it works with rockpool as good as with Jolla C. Have been reading about problems with connecting with cars though :(

Flashing was not so easy, mainly the unlocking part for me. Took me about 3h, I bet I could do it under 30min now, but now I don't need to anymore :) So better/simpler instructions would be great. Allso I thinkFlashing with Linux would have been way easier, even if I am not a heavy user.

Pictures are way better than on Jolla C and sadly way worse than on Xperia X with android :( It's understandable though, I don't know how many man hours Sony, Samsung etc. have used on camera software but it's definately more than Jolla can throw at it.