Another Kickstarter?

if i remember right it was talked about a split into jolla software and a hardware divisiok. then again there was never heard a word again about the latter.

what i think would be great would be an old design with improved hardware. a mid range phone with an old and loved look. like the n9, a moto g3 or the jolla with different then the original hardware. but i dont know about the rights for these designs- what would be needed to use them.

@kaktux The hardware division is long gone so no hope in getting a new device from Jolla themselves. As for the N9 design, Nokia/Microsoft/HMD has obviously gotten rid of the tooling a long time ago and even if whoever owns the IP can be persuaded to give it away the costs of re-creating the tooling are obviously going to be way too expensive for a kickstarter campaign. Only way Jolla could afford the tablet was that they got their hands on a mostly completed design, which however needed a number of changes due to a number of components like the screen going out of production and no suitable replacements existing.

To put the cost into perspective, somebody recently put up a campaign for new Amiga 1200 cases, which are made up of a number of relatively simple plastic pieces made based on an existing design, and that had a minimum funding goal of 125.000€ due to having to make brand new molds and that didn't even include new key caps. That was a separate campaign with a minimum funding goal of 102.000$.

@L_A_G: For reference here's the indiegogo campaign with youyota 2-in-1, the relaunch of the former Jolla Tablet design.

And regarding tooling :

On the other hand, Nokia has the network and the war chest to eventually manage to successfully regrow a hardware manufacturing capability.

So maybe in 5-10 years, there could be again Nokia-made smartphone (as opposed to the currently upcoming 3rd party Asian-made android-phone with a licensed Nokia logo on them).

And SFOS could be a distinguishing feature to make Nokia's future product stand apart no-name android-phones. (Just the same way Samsung is playing with their Tizen cousin to try to make some phones different)

@DrYak Fat chance of Nokia "re-growing" any phone manufacturing. The whole phone side of the business was sold to Microsoft and subsequently either shut down (smartphones) or sold (dumbphones) to HMD Global, who are owned and funded by Foxconn, i.e those "3rd party asians". As for the remaining Nokia phone factories, which were all in the far east, Microsoft sold them to FIH Mobile, which is a direct subsidiary of Foxconn.

Also, the lack of success with the original Jolla phones and relative success of the current Android Nokia phones goes to show that there definitely is a market for Android phones and that having an alternate OS isn't all that appealing to the masses. People on the whole simply don't care about being different if being the same is good.

So to put this simply: The ship has sailed (pun intended) on any Nokia SailfishOS device and Nokia devices not made in the far east. It's that simple.

The Jolla C is an okee phone, escpecially the speech quality is amazingly great. Being able to make phone calls in a noisy server room is something even high-end flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S models fail sometimes!

But yeah, the camera is an overpriced light-sensor, in other words, utter crap.

If you want a decent phone with good camera, try the Sony Xperia X! Although with Sailfish X you only get 16 Mpixels out of the 23 Mpixels possible, but still get very good results IMO.

There's also another limitation for "pure" SFOS devices (with no single Android part, à la Purism's Librem 5) :

Current Android app support solution do rely on android APIs being available in the Linux kernel.

And although there's a significant croud of "I viscerally hate Android and don't want it near my phone" users gathering to SFOS, completely ignoring the networking effect of an app ecosystem would be foolish for any new player in the smartphone field (as painfully discovered by Microsoft).

(Although, in Microsoft's case, they were actually aware of the app ecosystem problems. They just weren't able to achieve any Android app compatibility layer and WSL on Windows 10 is what useful stuff they managed to salvage of this failed attempt).

I'm not against the AlienDalvik Android support in SFOS, I totally agree with you that something like this is needed so appeal to users. Even I rely on some Android Apps on my device.

I referring to another aspect: Even when you run SFOS on the Xperia X, you still have a lot of Android-related stuff running on the device in the background (bootloader?, definitely drivers and other stuff). From my understanding, SFOS simply uses abstraction layers to run on a basic Android environment. While this works well, it's far from a really open system. To exaggerate this to make my point more clear: It's like running Linux inside a VM on your Windows OS because you don't like to use (or even distrust) Windows.

I'm totally aware of the issues in the mobile market with proprietary blobs and de-facto monopolies where you have to use what you get from the manufacturers (and sadly can't expect to get proper driver support for your system. Yes, I'm looking at you Qualcomm and Broadcom). Still this is a really unsatisfying situation if you dislike Android (like I do).

@ghling :

Yes, indeed to ease the speed of adapting to a new devices Sailfish OS (as well as Ubuntu Touch, BTW) rely on a piece of abstraction written by Jolla called "libhybris". This thing enable you to run drivers normally designed for Android and use them for a full blown GNU/Linux distro (e.g.: Android driver rely on Google's own homegrown Boinic C-library, instead of the usual GlibC, etc.)

(The boot loader it self doesn't have much to do with android. It's just a small piece of code that loads whatever linux kernel+initrd is on the boot partition, optionally checks its signature (if the bootloader isn't unlocked) or displays a warning (if the bootloader is unlocked), and then boots into it).

The more correct Windows metaphor is : You're using "Wine" to run some drivers because the hardware manufacturer produces only Windows drivers and you don't have the resources to reverse engineer and implement opensource drivers your self. NDISWrapper use to be such a stack.

The trust limit doesn't extend to Android. You're NOT running Android underneath the hood. You're only running the drivers that would normally go inside an Android installation and use libhybris to run them on your own full blown GNU/Linux OS.

So, if you don't trust Google to not put inside Android spying code that data mines the hell out of you, the user, for their gain : with Sailfish OS (and any other libhybris OS) you're safe. (Just like you don't need to trust Microsoft when using NDISWrapper).

But if you don't trust the hardware manufacturer not to have horrendously exploitable bugs in their blobs : Ooops. You're still running the same whole pile of crap from Qualcom, as opposed to the some Freedreno opensource driver (the same way that with NDISWrapper, you'd still run crappy code from Broadcom instead of some opensource driver running on the mac80211 stack).

Also, there's the separate elephant in the room : specially with Qualcom chip, the baseband modem is integrated into the main chipset, and act like a sort of northbridge to the chip. Meaning that code on which you legally cannot have control (as you don't have a license for the LTE frequencies yourself) and that is provided by the modem manufacturer and the ISPs, can potentially have access to your RAM.

And here the situation looks rather sad :

• Qualcom is dominating the hardware market.
• MediaTek isn't any better.
• Intel has completely exited the market
• AMD hasn't completely entered the ARM market, and aims at servers anyway.
• At least Texas Instrument had good mainstream linux support (except for the GPU part by PowerVR) but by now the chips are starting to show age (there are no 64bit OMAPs).
• Nvidia isn't targetting smart phone with their Tegra, and not all of them are supported by the opensource Nouveau
• i.MX6 and i.MX8 seem to be the only solution deemed acceptable by Purism, but they performance is lack-luster compared to current phone.

It is not profitable in nieche market numbers. Component prices tend to start at 10k units minimum, anything less and you are basically paying extra for bothering the manufacturer with small fry...

Youyota reports, that it starts at 3k. Other examples of small batches are the Lightphone, Previo, Uniherz(Jelly), Pebble.The best example for my theses is Sentio. They have a very interesting software, but make the money with teh hardware for the software. A negative example is Cyanogen Inc. They had the same business model as Jolla an run into insolvency, although some Smartphone vendors shipped models with their operation system. But Cyanogen Inc. made a further failure: The usp of their operation system was the respect of the user's privacy. So the os came without Goolge services. However Cynagen has started a cooperation with Microsoft and included heir services like Cortana. With this surveillance service, they did lost their target group.