Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

I meant to get it fully working, all the licensed stuff ready, ready to be installed onto the phones in the factory.

You could probably get it booting in a day if you knew what you were doing, but the thing with this phone is that it looks like it's going to have a keyboard (obviously), IR blaster, and NFC. None of which have been available on an officially licensed device. So getting those things working properly in UI and stuff will probably take a while.


Xperia partnership was announced in February, it's now August, and it's being tested by cbeta guys, 6 months later.

Intex partnership was announced in July 2015 at the Shanghai MWC event, the device wasn't released till a year later.

So there has been a larger turnaround recently.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

It may be a good idea to talk about it during the community meeting.

Wow, IR blaster! I remember doing Pierogi pranks with my N900, that's awesome.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Will there be NFC support?

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

If porting sailfish to every device needs 6 month, I think Jolla can shut down. I hope porting Sailfish to Xperia just takes so long, because of the 64bit processor.

Otherwise I have no Idea how to get manufacturers to sell their devices with sailfish on it.

I'm planning to buy chen's qwerty device. But if it comes to market without a OS, that supports keyboard and other components like the camera, it doesn't make much sense for me.

Even worse:
If I have to wait for that device until summer next year (wich wouldn't be a huge problem) and than it turns out, that the hw is quite nice, but the software isn't. I probably don't have the chance anymore to buy the Xperia X.

...And no, I have enough devices for now, I won't buy first the Xperia X, just to replace it 6 month later with the Livermorium device

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

That is probably why it the Xperia X is taking so long. But every time Jolla announce a device to be released by the end of the next quarter, it never happens.

Maybe they have experience with hw keyboard support in Sailfish when they first came about, iirc they were using n9 and possibly n950 to show off the OS. They are in a better financial position these days than before. So I too am hoping it won't take 6 months.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

That was one of the reasons my N950 didn't become my daily phone. The software was not at all optimized for a hw keyboard.

That was a real pain - to have a great device, which had poor software support for the hardware (let's be frank - poor software support altogether, sfos seems to have a better selection of quality software - all the Harmattan developers seem to have moved to sfos)

Exactly.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Porting is mostly reverse engineering, or re-engineering things to work with the OS. You can't really say "it will take X months" because there's no real way of knowing without getting stuck into it.

Some devices you can get working rather well very quickly in the community, some things are harder and many people give up before finishing it. These things are complicated, and if you buy a device you expect all the hardware pieces work with the software provided and that takes time.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Because sfos is a lot easier to develop for. Due to the aegis system on Harmattan, it's quite a pain to get things running.

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

NFC is the whole thing behind "TOH" concept.
Jolla 1 has a funcitonnal NFC antenna.
The thing is, it's currently not used for anything else beside identifying other halfs (and most importantly it's not available to android).
- So getting it to work as before wouldn't be much complicated
- Getting it to work perfectly as users would like THAT is going to take time, and specially ressource from Myriad in order to make sure that NFC is available to all the wireless payment android apps, etc.


Keyboard currently already works on Jolla1, both purely hardware (TOHKDB) and bluetooth (A 4-parts foldable (= the W shaped one) "Stowaway" bluetooth keyboard is my daily driver, whenever I'm sitting at a desk with enough room). And they both "just work".
Android App support keyboard nicely too.
- So getting basic keyboard working would be about correctly licensing the patch already floating for Jolla 1.
- Getting it to work perfectly boils down to small nitpicking about details

IR is the only odd thing. And even there, IR is usually showing as a simple serial port with a few specific ioctl.
- So getting it to work basically just like the FM radio on some community ports (have the port available in /dev/, maybe write a simple app to emit codes on the IR - like a remote control emulator). Won't take ages.
- What would take ages is implementing ton of protocols over IR (file exchange, etc.) but I don't know if those things are still relevant in 2017 (seriously, are they ?)

In other words, Jolla could rather quickly cobble together something that more or less works (see the speed of community ports as a rough idea), and could then spent the next 6 months shipping out *upgrades* to make everything work better (see firmware upgrades nowaday on Jolla Phone 1 as a reference).

In short :
- if you "just" want to have a Sailfish OS smartphone and don't mind spending some time on openrepos.net to get all the patches to customize : Chen's smartphone could have SFOS available rather fast.
- if you want a perfectly-working hassle-free experience on par with Samsung Phone (including payments over NFC), you'll have to wait longer, until Jolla and Myriad irons everything out. In the meantime, you should perhaps consider using Android on this phone.

I was under the impression that chelien tries to short-cut some of the time by partly re-using available designs (specially regarding the main PCB).

I'm not saying that the phone is going to be available by next week,
but that it might not take as much time as a complete "ground-up" solution (like Openmoko, etc.)

Re: The new QWERTY device project
 

Well, I use Jolla 1 since the start as my daily driver. I'm used to pimp it in the one or other direction. That's part of the fun, isn't it. I'm just expecting the key-features to work mostly bugfree. Tinkering around and using differnt patches is OK for me.