Jolla held an official launch event for its new mobile OS yesterday at SLUSH 2012 in Helsinki, Finland. The new Jolla Sailfish mobile OS is the successor to the popular MeeGo. The particular strengths of Jolla Sailfish are said to be multi-tasking, app and notification peeking, its open source nature and adaptability for smartphones, smart TVS, tablets and automotive uses. A clever advantage this new mobile OS has is that many Android apps are compatible without modification, say the developers.
The best way to check out this new mobile OS, or any OS, isn’t through words or pictures so luckily there are a couple of videos following yesterday’s unveiling, showing the OS in action. The first of the videos below is a glossy marketing effort and the second one is one of Jolla's Senior Designer, Jaakko Roppola, demonstrating the UI.
Jolla promotional video
Jolla OS multitasking and peeking UI demonstration
Looking at the video presentations the Sailfish OS looks quite beautiful, minimal, slick and smooth. It seems to have a good few influences in there like some Windows Phone typography and live tiles, some BlackBerry 10 peeking and multitasking. When added to the Android app compatibility it sounds and looks like a winning combination. It’s still very early days and it would be good to see an independent third party poke around the OS.
Jolla said the new Sailfish mobile OS already supports multiple chipsets and its developers are trying to get it running on as wide a selection as possible. The OS is already working on ST-Ericsson's NovaThor platform. Marc Dillon, CEO of Jolla added that “We also target to announce other chipset provider partnerships soon." Finnish carrier DNA will be selling Sailfish powered smartphones.
It will be interesting to see what devices get equipped with Jolla Sailfish OS and how many chipsets the developers can get it working upon. Hopefully more details and parrtnerships will be revealed soon.
