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Jolla Sailfish mobile OS, MeeGo successor, launched

by Mark Tyson on 22 November 2012, 14:00

Tags: PC

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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.



HEXUS Forums :: 8 Comments

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Looks interesting,fresh and in some similar to android!
All the best bits of the current OS's in one package with a clean, tidy and simple interface…

MeeGo was fantastic.
On a separate note, Damien Dinning, imaging guy extraordinaire is leaving Nokia for ‘personal’ reasons. I wonder where he will turn up to next?
It looks brilliant, I love the whole pull down menu where the further you pull the different selections. This is what BB10 needed to be like to provide a solid user experience, I cant wait to try this!

Go MeeGO!

Does anyone know how this will get onto other devices? I assume it will be able to run on any t3/s4 SoC etc? Be nice to port it onto my O2x :D.
We are no longer in a world where mobile OSes compete. We are in a world where mobile ecosystems compete. A good OS is irrelevant without the ecosystem to go with it. And MeeGo has no ecosystem.