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The Jolla Smartphone will be running on software dumped by Nokia in 2011
A team of former Nokia employees have built and released their first handset running on a new OS that was developed and abandoned by Nokia in 2011
The Jolla phone (pronounced yol-la) runs on the open-source operating system Sailfish, which can run most of the apps designed for the Android platform.
The new company has teamed up with a Finnish network and is planning to strike a similar deal with a UK network operator.
Experts say that Jolla will face serious competition as the market is strongly dominated by Apple and Google, but Marc Dillon, co-founder of the company, told the BBC that the company was currently boosting its manufacturing and that it would provide the public with a more ‘open’ way to use their mobiles, as opposed to the more ‘locked’ and ‘closed’ systems as observed with iPhones and, to a lesser degree, on Android devices.
450 Jolla phones will be launched on Wednesday evening, the majority of which will be going to customers who had made pre-orders for the device.
Marc Dillon says that they are creating a world-class platform with more choices for users.
The Sailfish platform was initially called MeeGo, and was developed by Nokia and dumped in 2011, because there was a move for the company to adopt Windows Phone technology instead. Only one phone was released by Nokia with the MeeGo software – the N9-00.
Chairman and co-founder of Jolla, Antti Saarnio, says that MeeGo – which is now called Sailfish – hadn’t been given enough chance to prove itself and succeed.
There is a Sailfish website and developers are invited to come and contribute to the project.