Jolla, a start-up founded by former executives and engineers from Nokia’s elite Meego-N9 smartphone development team, has demonstrated its forthcoming MeeGo-based Sailfish OS platform.
According to ZDNet, during its presentation at the Slush developer conference in Finland, the company demonstrated its software and announced that it has signed an agreement to sell its first phone through Finnish carrier DNA during the first half of 2013.
Jolla announced a key feature of Sailfish OS would be the ability for carriers and other businesses to install their own app stores.
“In the past, early device manufacturers made the devices and the operators sold them. Then the operators started pushing their own services. With the main ecosystem companies [Apple and Google] – the duopoly as some call it – there’s very little opportunity for an operator to create a deeply integrated service in those operating systems,” Jolla CEO Marc Dillon says.
“With Apple it’s almost impossible, with [each new] Android the release [that] goes out they have to reintegrate it, change it and make sure it works in that form [with] every new version that comes out.”
“With an open operating system and ecosystem, different technologies can be introduced. There’s no politics, no strategy… We can make a bunch of different variants from it that might have different technologies, a different look and feel and stuff like that. That is what Sailfish is offering.”
The company has announced that ST?Ericsson will support Sailfish OS in its NovaThor chipset, and that it expects to announce further chipset manufacturer partners in the near future. The company has also released a development kit for the platform.
Here is a video of Jolla Sailfish in action:
{qtube vid:=tRZxM9rNyZ4}
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
