Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

This is the biggest lesson of the Jolla story. Openness is a very dangerous policy - it's great when everything's going well, but when things get tricky your customers will damn you if you tell them and damn you if you don't. #

The most disappointing thing for me here is that the age of the craftsman unassumingly making great things with skill and getting respect for it is gone. It's the age of the salesman now. It doesn't matter what may be best for *you*, because everyone's opinion matters, the customer is always right and the salesman is the best at massaging opinion. This is why the US is winning - and the Finnish psyche doesn't stand a chance.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

This is an interesting view, less harsh and more reasonable than the bile in this thread. I think it's a bit unfair to blame the sailors for policies enforced by the investors though. I'm sure they would have loved to have found someone who would give them $50m to produce only GPL code, but the deal they struck is better than nothing. This will rear its ugly head if they do close, because I bet they won't allow what they view to be their assets to be open-sourced then either without some serious persuasion.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Oh come on now, you can criticise Google and Apple for a lot, but there's more to their products than just salesmanship. Apple have excelled in selling what is undoubtedly a high quality product that is easy enough to use by the masses. Google have sold an open sourced product that has more power, customization and control for users. Both companies saw areas where they could compete and both did so successfully. Jolla on the other hand still don't have a clue what they are trying to do with Sailfish. We've seen so many changes in strategy it's beyond a joke. First they talked about cracking China, then they talked about doing hardware/software together, then they tried selling to mobile operators, then they tried to crack India - who knows what they will try next. Assuming they even get funding - if Jolla try to go it alone, they will fail again.

The Sailfish OS patient is close to death. If Jolla (or whoever takes it over) - then the only way to revive the patient won't be with minor tinkering, it's going to require a complete change. At this stage, there is very little to lose in opening sourcing Sailfish.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

I don't see a reason to stick so much to Tizen's past - does that really matter to market or average customer which OS/company had more glorious history? Mobile phones from Nokia had a great history, but where are they now? Huh?

But if you want to dwell into the past, then let's go.
I see Samsung's strategy as more far-sighted than Nokia had. I remember the the times when Samsung phones were not widely known and popular. At that time you could pick up a Samsung phone with Symbian, Windows Mobile (and later Windows Phone), Android and their own Bada OS. Samsung was trying many different options at the same time instead of betting almost everything on one platform like Nokia did (Symbian, then Windows Phone). That way, when it was clear that Android is taking the lead, Samsung could quickly go that way, scale up while droping those platforms that didn't have a future (Symbian, Windows Phone) and focusing on new promising ones to become a significant player on the mobile devices market in the end. Even though they became mostly Android, they haven't stopped working on the possible future alternatives. Tizen came as an evolution of SLP (Samsung Linux Platform) with some parts borrowed from Meego. Start wasn't impressive, it was in fact mostly disappointing, but they are improving.

It's easy to state, that Samsung could have put more effort on Tizen, as they are a big company and Tizen could do better, but Nokia was also (still is) a big company, so why they did not put more effort and resources on Maemo and Meego? Why Nokia had such a big delays in releasing the first Meego device (before Feb 2011). And in the end was it a real, pure Meego or more-like Maemo 6 with Meego compatibility?

Finally, so what that Samsung is a giant? Is it Samsung's fault that they grew so much as a result of running a successful business. People often repeat that Nokia started from rubber and paper. Do you know how Samsung started? Company was founded in 1938 and it wasn't easy to run a company in the first years under Japanese occupation, then during Korean civil war in 50s. Even having such hard start they've prevailed, developed and became a global player and leader in some areas. If you dig deeper the history of Samsung is no less interesting than history that Nokia had.

That's the past, but it's really not important to mass customer. Average customer doesn't really care if product he uses was made by a big corporation or a small startup. What matters is the product and what it offers to him/her as a customer.

It's a fact that Tizen become 4th smartphone platform, an important smartwatch and smart TV platform. Tens of milions devices sold in total with Tizen (compare that to tiny ~30000-50000 Jolla phone sales). People by shouting at TMO that "Tizen is a piece of crap without future" won't cover the above facts.

Instead of constantly looking at the past and thinking "what if", look at the future and help to shape it.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

That's the power of leveraging a known and visible brand.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Of course not, but it's salesmanship that buffs up the good side and distracts from the bad. We say that people don't realise that app stores are anti-competitive, or that they're been stalked for advertising hints, but that's not strictly true. They've been convinced that those things aren't important, and even that anyone concerned with them is to be looked down on.

With salesmanship, all the points you state could be turned around into facing challenges against the odds etc etc. We don't even know how to take failure anymore unless it's dressed up this way. Successful people fail sometimes. Apple got bailed out by Microsoft. Google buzzed/waved/plussed. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying/selling.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

What depresses me most about Jolla is that even now, when they appear to be at death's door, they talk about providing an alternative to iOS and Android. They do not have, never have had, and will never have any chance of doing that. If a third consumer phone OS ever gains a significant market share, it will come from a giant company like Microsoft or Samsung, because a company like that can afford to lose money making phones for many years, until they somehow crack the market. Even if Jolla comes up with some fantastic features for Sailfish, which are so clearly superior to iOS and Android that Jolla phones start selling briskly, those features will quickly appear on Android phones. If Apple can't keep Samsung from poaching its IP, then Jolla certainly can't. For Jolla, trying to crack the general consumer market for phones is futile.

I would suggest that they should try to find a much smaller, but potentially profitable market which is not large enough to interest the big players. I think they should build a device that is targeted at computer professionals. The key differentiator would be that this device is meant to be a second mobile device. The use case would assume that the user has with him a primary phone, iOS, Android or whatever, and the Jolla device is a second mobile device which provides enough utility to be worth having with you even though you have a regular cell phone too. To make it worthwhile to carry two devices, you optimize the Jolla device software to make it an excellent device for managing remote computers. This is the main reason I still carry my N900 around - for my job, I occasionally get phone calls telling me that there are problems with our computers or some software at work. I am "on call" 24 hours a day in this sense. And if I get such a call when I'm at a restaurant, or walking to work, or in a park, I need to be able to interface with remote machines, see what's going on, and fix the problem. The N900 is good for that, and had it been designed explicitly for that purpose, it could have been even better.

If you make a device that is squarely aimed at system manager type individuals, many of them will be able to get their employer to buy one for them. This should help sales. Computers are absolutely ubiquitous today, so there must be at least hundreds of thousands of computer professionals worldwide who could find such a device interesting. These people have money, and their employers have more money, so you could build a fairly high-end device that had a healthy profit margin even at modest sales volumes.

You want to use the "second device" usage case to differentiate it as much as possible from regular cell phones (the primary device). Don't include a camera - the user already has one in his regular cell phone. No accelerometer, magnetometer etc. Don't pointlessly duplicate hardware that the user already has in his primary phone. Instead, put a big battery in the Jolla device, and make sure that the Jolla device can be used as a charger for the primary device. Many manufacturers sell portable chargers, so there must be a market for them. Users will not need a portable charger for their phone if the Jolla device has that capability, and it's a very nice feature for persons who travel a lot. Give the Jolla device two microSD slots, and make them hot swappable. You can consider making the device WiFi-only (assuming tethering with the primary device's WiFi signal), but if you do include phone hardware, make it easy to insert the SIM from the primary phone into the Jolla device. The phone use case is as a backup phone in case the primary phone dies.

Optimize the software for serious computer work, not fun. Forget Facebook, make sure ssh, vnc etc. work very well. Consider dropping Wayland for X11, but if you go with Wayland, make sure it can work as an X11 server. No fancy UI. No animations, minimal compositing etc. Those things just pointlessly piss away your battery. Try to build a phone your niece would *hate*. When you add fancy software features, make sure they are fancy *nerd* software features, like having the phone automatically mount its microSD cards on your home and work computers, via sshfs, when it detects the appropriate WiFi signal.

This approach means you don't have to worry about not having a competative app ecosystem. There's no need for half-assed Android compatibility. No need to sing the old song about "web apps" being as good as native ones now. Your killer "apps" are things like vnc which are already available for linux. You are building a pocket workstation primarily, not a game player.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Um....

They have said since from the beginning that they do not want to be a HW company, but a SW company. They produced spearhead devices to get something out. There is no change in that. Cracking China is of course another thing, but knowing how difficult market it is (especially for small players who can be robbed at will without fear of reprisal), it's no wonder they decided to shift the focus elsewhere as it turned out that the chinese only wanted to get their knowhow and ip instead of real cooperation. India seems more reasonable and they did succeed in finding partners there. Which is the irony, why their funding fails just when there actually are partners and revenue streams begin to emerge.

Everybody talks about "complete change" quite lightly. Maybe you can elaborate in more concrete form what you actually mean by that "complete change?"

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

I have already said several times.

Open source the damn thing. I think it's too late to save Jolla the company, but a chance exists for save Sailfish OS as a community run project.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

"Complete change" is IMO something else than just "open source the damn thing." I was expecting some deeper technical flaws that should be addressed in that "complete change" (hinting that just about everything with Sailfish OS is wrong and bad) instead of yet another punchline that in itself doesn't really mean much. Open sourcing is and has never been a magic bullet to correct it all (if it did, there wouldn't be open source projects consisting of pretty awful code and/or technical choices) and it is known fact that if platform is dying, open sourcing never turns it around. IMO the suggested dual/tri-way licensing scheme in similar vein to Qt licensing would be a good way to go, but also investors need to be convinced of it.

As Sailfish is based on already open source code for quite big part, issues lie mostly elsewhere. That can be debated, but please, don't offer empty slogans as a solution to real or imaginary need of "complete change" in platform.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

And I have already said this several times: why the heck do you think that? We've already got Mer / Nemo. It has the same base OS as Sailfish. It is 100% open source. It is also almost 100% ignored by everybody on this board.

Why do you think Sailfish would saved by being open-sourced? From what I can see here, I would expect it'd be dropped like a hot rock, and folks here would move on to the next mobile OS. In just a few weeks all the posts here will switch to "Open-source Tizen! It's the only way to save the OS..."

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Because I have been able to flash a Nexus 5 with Sailfish (most things worked), but not at all with Mer (although it's been a long time since I've tried).

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

But how does Jolla, the company with real employees who like being paid, survive in this scenario? If Sailfish is open sourced, and users just download it onto an ex-Android phone, where does Jolla get its money? If I were working at Jolla, I would not be attracted to schemes for saving Sailfish that did not include a clear revenue stream for Jolla.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Yep. Please make me aware of what time you'd be available for me to toss stones in your direction.

If you're being serious, he's still spreading his agenda. It has been the same since he's been here and it will continue. I can say very easily that I'm tired of his oft repeated stuff all based on his personal take of the company that he thinks has spurned him somehow.

You want to feed that fire; so be it. I will challenge it each and every time I see it. This is not the place for puerile antics as such. We already have Dave999 ;)

I'll save finger pointing for the next post. No need to use both of my tactics as you've stated.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

As I've stated before, I'd be happy to pay a yearly subscription charge for an image that was certified on a mainstream device like a Nexus 5.

I certainly agree that Sailfish would need experts who are getting paid - whether there are enough people out there willing to stump up the cash - I don't know.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

So? Mer / Nemo is open-source. That means you can fix it. So do so.

What, you don't want to do the work? Then why would you want to do the work with Sailfish? Just because something is open-source doesn't mean folks will work on it.

This is what drives me bonkers. Jolla has put real effort into Sailfish. That's why you can flash it onto a Nexus 5 so easily. Nobody seems to want to put any effort into Nemo. The only difference between Sailfish and Nemo? Nemo is 100% open-source. Make Sailfish 100% open source as well, and you'll see it'll immediately receive just as much support as Nemo gets...

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Aside all the personal fights and problems that he was involved with. he had a lot of constructive points and ideas in most of his posts. But yeah, once person slips once in certain situation you already put a huge X on him doesn't matter what. Like we all are holy and have not done any mistakes.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Yes, as long as the thing to fix is in the open source component, which often is not the case. Also there is a serious overall lack of documentation in the Mer/Nemo/Sailfish land and random parts being closed does not really help with tracking down issues as you basically stumble on black boxes left and right.

The other difference is that Sailfish OS is a quite complete and overall working system while Nemo is basically a bunch of middleware (the same Sailfish OS makes use off) but without most of the actual user facing bits (all system level GUI elements, core apps) + some minor stuff salvaged from the MeeGo era.

So one is unusable until you spend huge resources to basically rewrite all the closed bits (this might sound familiar to some people...) while the other is kinda useable but fundamental pieces are closed and can't be fixed and improved by the community.

Actually I think we would get significant amount of contributions as there would finally be something that is both in usable shape and fully open source.

It is much easier & much more motivating to fix & improve something you and others can actually use day-to-day rather than hacking on something for years without visible results.

I think the N900 and its community are good example of this - even though still hindered by closed parts, it is a device & platform that is quite open & day-to-day usable, which is IMHO why it has spawned such a considerable & durable community that is still writing apps, improving & supporting the platform to this day, long after the N900 has been officially discontinue and all official support dropped.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

IME most Android devices, with enough RAM in them, are fine at that and certainly way, way better than Sailfish running on a Jolla.

And they're better at all the other stuff too.

And that's the problem. You need to be great at both the techie stuff AND the consumer or business oriented stuff.

You need massive resources to do that yourself OR a motivated community and developer community. Jolla have none of those and their efforts to foster a fan community and developer community have been awful. "People Powered" - come on! Utter tripe.

Much as I think together.jolla.com is pretty terrible as a project/bugtracking environment*, it does provide a 'list' of things that need fixing but neither Jolla or the Community are in a position to fix them when one has no resources and the other is locked out.



* It's more like somewhere to light your torches and gather your pitch forks while Jolla sit behind the castle walls.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Because I just wouldn't have the skilzz..

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

All of Mer / Nemo is an open source component, isn't it?

What random parts of Mer / Nemo are closed? And why would Mer / Nemo (again, 100% open source) have a serious overall lack of documentation? Shouldn't being open-source have fixed that by now?

Yes! Being 100% open-source, Nemo is missing a lot of stuff that you need. Not being 100% open-source, Sailfish has that stuff. Man, having closed-source parts really hurt Sailfish in this case, didn't it...

Yes, absolutely! After spending millions of dollars, Jolla has built quite a nice UI on top of Mer. The problem is, those millions of dollars were not charity money. Maybe the investors will be willing to just throw away those millions of dollars and walk away, but I kind of doubt it.

Great. So, you're saying that open-source contributions can really only work at the tail end of a project, for (say) maintenance and small incremental work. Hurrah for open-source! :(

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Come on, is that all? No telling arguments?
Well let me tell you why I stick to the past: I'm no clairvoyant I can just stick to the past and there Tizen developed worse than Sailfish. Although Sansung should have enough Money to push Tizen. So why should that really change. Running Smartwatches and TV's with an OS is a huge difference to running Smartphones with you own OS. Or is there any WebOS phone anymore?

Samsung has the same problem as all the others but Apple.
They have not enough apps to be successful. Thats's the neckbreaker for all the other OSs. And I doubt Samsung has enough balls to push Tizen long enough. So the future for Tizen is eventually not so bright and it will end there where it stands at the moment: As an OS for TVs and Smartwatches. But that's speculation. So I stick to the past and there Samsung didn't show a massive love for Tizen.

(By the way. I think the only company which has enough stamina to get a bigger market share is Microsoft)

On the other hand we don't know how it ends with Sailfish. There are absolutely thinkable ways to succeed. I fear not with Jolla, but if a bigger company has a real interest in pushing their own OS on the Market maybe there will be a buyer. But that can also leed to another TV OS....

All speculation. So I stick to the past as long as you don't donate me a crystal ball.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Sooo... You're saying that you want Sailfish to become open source, in the expectation that folks will work on it for you for free? ;)

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

This is where we disagree. I have an Android phone, and although I've installed software to provide X11 capability on it, it works poorly. The keyboards on Android devices are not optimized for modifying shell scripts etc. I'm suggesting making a device that is excellent for techie stuff, and stinks for consumer stuff. Stop trying to compete with Apple, Samsung and 10,000 smaller Android players. Jolla is a small company. Look for a niche that can support a small company, and forget trying to rule the consumer world.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Sorry for not being clear - I was responding from the point of view of fixing things in Sailfish OS.

Of course, you can fix everything in Mer/Nemo - if your are brave enough to be running it somewhere separately from Sailfish Os given it's current state...

If someone was using it appart from being a chassis for Sailfish OS, then yes. But thats again the problem - no one (AFAIK) is really using Mer/Nemo for anything other than Jolla for Sailfish OS. And Jolla developers understandably have (at least currently) other priorities than to write docs or don't really feel the immediate need to do so as they probably know the given systems in-and-out.

I'm sure that even Nemo Mobile was in a more usable shape as an open mobile distro the docs situation (among other things) would be better off.

It would not be the first time such thing happened. :) (actually reading the history of Blender, it seems to be strangle similar to the Jolla/Sailfish one so far)

No, I'm saying that people are much more likely to contribute to something they can actually use themselves. That's all.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

So basically the Pyra ? :)

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Not quite. The Pyra is at least partially optimized for games. It has game controls, etc. I think it will be hard for a game-oriented linux device to get traction, because you will be in competition with games on iPhones and Android machines. Those phones are going to have much better games. I suspect that the number of people who are willing to buy a Pyra will not be large enough to support even a samll company like Jolla. But I could of course be wrong, and I'll buy a Pyra when they go on sale. I agree with you that a Pyra is close to what I'm suggesting.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

I guess solu is trying this subscription model, so we'll see how it works.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Research done in the UK showed the majority of adult smartphone users had never installed an app. Beyond that there's many users who only care about a few key apps (SatNav, WhatsApp, FaceBook,..). I find the idea Tizen needs the ocean of washed up garbage that pollutes Google Play and Apples' app store in order to be successful highly dubious. A gazillion worthless apps that never get downloaded and never get updated... who gives a stuff?


Samsung doesn't have the cojones? I understand they're building huge manufacturing plants in Vietnam where the cost of labour is a fraction of that in China (and the Vietnamese government has given them a cosy tax deal too) so the Chinese manufacturers can't simply rely on undercutting in the future. That's costing Samsung billions right now but they're gambling on it paying off longer term. I think that takes balls/ovaries (don't want to appear sexist ;)), don't you?

So what's the cost of Tizen in the scheme of things? And by all accounts Tizen is much better than Android on budget devices which is where most of the untapped market is now.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Have you tried "Hacker's Keyboard" ?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...ion.pckeyboard

I use that. It's wonderful.

I also have a Freedom iConnex bluetooth keyboard.

I can't help you on X11 though. Not had a need to touch that in about 20 years. I've used it on desktop Linux of course but that's more by accident rather than design. Used it on my Mac too but that's more like self flagellation than an accident or design.

I don't know a techie that still doesn't need a calendar or contacts database that works. Neither of them do currently on Sailfish unless bizarrely you use Google or Exchange. Most of the open source solutions techies desire are buggy or only work in very simplified circumstances.

But that's an aside. Even if they just concentrate on 'techie stuff' they've IME got some way to go to catch up even on the day to day tasks a sysadmin gets asked to do like reset someones password, switch a server off and on, copy a cert, edit DNS. These things I do most days and it was immensely painful if not impossible to do on Sailfish and ended up just sticking it in hotspot mode and grabbing an Android tablet or laptop. At that point, you may as well just carry an old Nokia.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Thanks for the tip; I'd never heard of the Android Hacker's keyboard.

I'm suggesting they build a device that would be your second handheld device. I assume the user has an Android or iOS phone as their first device, so it doesn't matter if the calendar software on this second device sucks. You'll use your phone's calendar.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Saw this today, made me think of Jolla:

http://imgur.com/gTN0I7W

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Third "clear goal" on merproject.org

"Primary customers are device vendors - not end-users"

I would say "device vendor" really. I may be speaking out of turn here but have any device vendors wanted to pick up Mer and not Sailfish?

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

ok. I was just pointing out that Android already makes a good first device AND a good second device. The techie niche you're aiming for is already filled by a consumer oriented device. Jolla would have to go some to beat what is already available for Android even if they just concentrated on making a phone for techies.

It's kind of like how people claim Macs are for consumers and Linux is for techies but IME Macs are good at both. Why would you want something that's only good at a subset of software?

Would I run a Mac server though... er no. :D

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Well it may be that if you hunt down the right apps, an Android phone is good for remote system management. I have not done anything like an exhaustive search. But I use an Android phone and IMHO out-of-the-box Android sucks for managing remote servers, so I don't think it's a good second device in the sense I've been using. I'm suggesting that Jolla make a device with everything preloaded and pre-optimized for system management activities. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are over 360,000 network and system managers employed in the US. That means there are a few million worldwide. Get >10% of them to buy an expensive Jolla device with their company's money, and you've got a better business model than Jolla has now, I think. Obviously there would be other people besides system managers who would be interested in a pocket sized gnu/linux workstation, as is evidenced by the existance of this website.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

damn right

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIyGF-fkd-8

Control the tablet production from there.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

at least some still have some hope:
http://insalgo.com/en/products/aidlab

:)

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Damn, that's the best TOH I have seen since Dirks keyboard. Jollas announcements must put a downer on there great idea.

Re: The Future of Jolla's Tablet
 

Its sad how this is the only other OTHER HALF that can be found (and which actually has a sense). :(