After weeks of promos, Snapdeal will next week launch Jolla, the eponymously named smartphone from Jolla Oy, a Finnish company that was formed from the remnants of Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo operating system project.
Jolla’s Sailfish operating system was supposed to be one of the challengers to Android, along with Samsung’s Tizen, but while the developers got their act together, Mozilla has already launched its Firefox OS phones in the Indian market.
However, Jolla, the first phone from Jolla Oy, has been available in Europe for a few months. However, it is fast-growing, experimentative markets like India that hold true promise for alternate operating system, as a large section of the mobile users are yet to get hitched to any platform at all.
In contrast, most mobile phone users have grown accustomed to Android or iOS in developed countries like the US.
For a flagship phone, the Jolla is unlikely to make a big first impression. It is neither super fast, nor ultra big, or extremely cheap. It is, in other words, extremely middle-of-the-line in terms of specifications.
The Jolla phone, due to be launched by Snapdeal on 23 (coming Tuesday), has a 4.5 inch IPS quarter HD display with Gorilla Glass 2, an 8 MP camera, 1 GB of RAM and perhaps its biggest differentiator, LTE 800 and 1800. The presence of LTE means that the phone would work on the upcoming service to be launched Reliance Jio in March next year.
Another differentiator is the phone’s a gesture-based user interface, developed using the Qt, QML and HTML5, and first seen in Nokia’s N9.
Going by previous experience, however, the phone is unlikely to come cheap, and may be priced in the Rs 15,000-20,000 range.
Jolla, however, will support Android Apps, as it is based on essentially the same internals.
The phone, which will not support Google Play store directly, is also supposed to be compatible with the RPM standard of Linux software.
