A startup of former Nokia employees presents its smartphone Jolla

As promised last month, startup Jolla Ltd. founded by former employees of Nokia revealed its first smartphone. The device has an unusual design, runs on MeeGo-based Sailfish OS, which allows launching Android apps and is simply called Jolla.

Updated Jolla.com website is dedicated to the smartphone. The device is a plastic monoblock with interchangeable colored panels; visually the device is quite thick. The smartphone looks like it is assembled from two parts. This design may seem original to someone, and someone would find it ridiculous.

The "alternative" Finnish phone has an HD 4.5-inch display (1280?720 pixels), a dual-core processor, 16 GB ROM and a microSD slot. The main camera resolution is 8 megapixels, the multimode transceiver supports LTE, and the battery can be easily changed on the go.

The device has multi-colored rear panels (The Other Halves) that automatically change smartphone’s interface adjusting to the given style. Finally, Jolla’s interchangeable cases may storage some content, for example, they can storage a new album of your favorite band and use its cover image as a design feature.

As stated on Jolla’s website, the sales will begin in Europe before the end of 2013, and then, perhaps, in other regions. The estimated price of the device without taxes and subsidies is 399 EUR (about 16K RUR). It will be 100 EUR cheaper for those preordered the device.

Sailfish OS has noticeably changed compared to its earlier demo versions. The interface is still based on the vertical and horizontal swipe gestures (the device has neither hardware nor touch-screen or system buttons), but now the main screen displays up to nine app widgets instead of four.
According to vesti.ru, a group of employees participated in the MeeGo platform development left Nokia and established Jolla startup. Mark Dillon was among them; he worked for the company for almost 11 years and served as the chief engineer for MeeGo since 2006. The development of this promising, according to many experts, platform was stopped by the current CEO of Nokia Steven Ilop, who moved the top smartphones of the Finnish company over to Microsoft software.

Jolla attracted 200M EUR from investors (not specified) on the development of MeeGo. Subsequently, the OS was renamed to Sailfish. Tom Pienimaki replaced Mark Dillon as the company’s CEO to let him spend more time working on the OS as the head of software development at Jolla Ltd.

Jolla has an important advantage, since the OS has a built-in client that allows you to run non-customized Android apps. Theoretically, this should rid Sailfish of a typical problem of new operating systems - an acute shortage of high-quality software.