Jolla, a company formed by a group of former Nokia employees, has
entered the Indian market with a smartphone of the same name, powered by
the new Sailfish OS and
priced attractively at Rs. 16,499.
The
company has chosen Snapdeal as the exclusive online retailer in India for
Jolla smartphones, and had teased its plans to launch in India way back
in July. It seems that the company is emulating the strategy that has
been successful for Motorola and Xiaomi so far.
In a market
already crowded with similar Android devices, Sailfish OS is completely
new and offers a gesture-based interface.Jolla proclaims "We are
unlike," which is its way of separating its hardware and software from
the rest of the phone crowd.But will customers be willing to try
something new? We spent some time with new Jolla smartphone to learn
exactly how unique the new OS is.
Software
Sailfish OS was
developed by few former employees of Nokia who had worked on the MeeGo
operating system which was cancelled when Nokia hit tough times. The
team had enough faith in their work that they started their own company
in order to continue and see it through.
With iOS, Windows Phone,
BlackBerry OS and now even Firefox OS competing for the shrinking
non-Android share of the market, one might wonder what is so different
about Sailfish OS. The Jolla smartphone's interface is heavily driven by
gestures and has similarities to BlackBerry's BB 10 OS, such as tiles
representing running apps.
The lock screen, much like other OSes,
shows notifications for various apps and services. However the first
homescreen shows up to nine tiles representing running apps, which you
can interact with. The screen can also be pulled up with a gesture while
any app is running.
A Jolla employee told NDTV Gadgets that the
Sailfish OS was built "to be used just by one hand". One can interact
with the running apps and services via swipes, and notably, there is no
home button on the front panel. Jolla believes that the home button
should always be right under the user's thumb, wherever it is.
To
get to the main app drawer from the homescreen, users have to just
flick a thumb upwards.Just swipe from the left or right of the screen to
multitask, and if you want to close an app, just swipe from the top of
the display to the bottom. For accessing the Events (notifications),
users have to swipe up from beyond the bottom edge.
At the launch
event, the company claimed that the Jolla smartphone will come with very
few preloaded apps, though the unit we tried out had popular apps such
as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Angry Birds, Zomato,
Bollywood Hungama, and ESPN Cricinfo already installed.
The
company also confirmed that the Sailfish OS can run Android apps, and
roughly 85,000 are compatible. Android apps can be downloaded from
third-party app stores such as Yandex and Aptoide.
Hardware
At
first glance, the smartphone appears like two rectangles sandwiched
together.The unique design of the Jolla phone is due to itsremovable
rear shell, the "Other Half" which is a patented innovation. The covers
are NFC enabled and the phone can detect when a new cover is attached.
It can then changeits wallpaper, icons, and theme to match the
colour.The Other Half back covers are available in Poppy Red, Keira
Black, and Aloe.
Thanks to the low weight, the Jolla smartphone
was comfortable to use with just one hand. The front is completely bare
of buttons and even branding. Only the earpiece grill and 2-megapixel
front camera are visible.
The bottom panel houses speakers, while
top houses the 3.5mm audio port and Micro-USB charging port. Jolla
branding can be seen on the top as well. The rear panel has the
8-megapixel primary camera accompanied by an LED flash, and a Jolla logo
lower down.
The phone features a 4.5-inch 540x960-pixelqHD
display. The display on the Jolla looks fine for daily tasks. Colours
are not exceptional but are good enough for this segment.
A 1.4GHz
dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor powers the device coupled with
1GB of RAM. This might not seem very modern, but in our experience it
was enough to let us multitask without any probem. There is 16GB of
storage, which is expandable via microSD card, and also a removable
2100mAh battery.
The biggest challenge for Jolla will be
convincing the Indian consumers to give the new Sailfish OS a chance,
rather than going with the established Android or even Windows Phone
devices available in same price band.
Jolla C Smartphone With Sailfish OS 2.0, 5-Inch Display Launched27 May 2016
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