Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Now that we're coming up to the 1 year anniversary of the Jolla device being out, just thought I'd create a topic to talk about the success of this venture.

I guess that success for this project can only be gauged by shipments. Has anyone got any numbers on shipments? I am in the UK, and I have yet to meet a single person with a Jolla in the wild. Looking at the Jolla store, the top apps have not been too heavily downloaded. Even if you take the top app, then double or triple that number, you still have a fairly low 5 figure number for active devices. From what I see online, there's a hardcare of folks on Twitter who are talking about Jolla, but it's not more than a few hundred people. The funny thing I've noticed is the number of Jolla employees who actually tweet using iphones, that certainly makes me wonder.

I don't wish to be disparaging. I love my Jolla, I use it as my daily driver, but from what I can see, the traction behind it just hasn't been great. At some point, this company will need to stand on its own two feet. If we're only selling a 5 digit number of devices, I don't think the company can do that. It seems to me that there just aren't enough people who care about a proper Linux-based OS.

Thoughts?

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Unfortunately even here in Finland, even though Jolla launch was on the news, I have met only very few people who know what Jolla is. Most "techies" of course know, but those people are in the know of all things related. Regular consumers have no idea, and I don't believe Jolla has ever advertised in TV or magazines. DNA (Finnish carrier) only had some magazine ads during the first month or so.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I think they are doing well, in the sense that they are entering more and more markets.
However, they are probably late compared to their first hopes.

So the true question to me is 'how long can they cope with having mid-success?' or said differently, how long their investors can wait for a return.

I am still optimistic as the cost in running their business is pretty low (due to the size of the company) while their prospects is pretty high: even a 1% of the market is huge for them (that means many devices sold per Jolla employee).
Additionally I believe the brand is more and more well-known, due to their different launches (estonia, kazakhstan, hk, india, namibia) and to the use of the android community (xda-dev).

What is still pending is their success in promoting the OS with other phone makers. This is still to come. Or maybe they have changed their plan and will only delivers to consumers directly (via Android launcher and hadk), as makers are not responding yet...

At the end, I have no idea how many Jolla they sold but during HK launch, I think the CEO was quite ambitious:
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Jolla...ile-OS_id59610

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I have to disagree. The success of this project is more than evident already: It's the product in our hands.

To build something as complex as a smartphone with technology taken almost exclusively from the GNU/Linux desktop world (plus a little magic and a stroke of genius) and actually sell it on three continents, even have deals with picky carriers... And to achieve all this as a company that until not long ago had less than 100 employees... This is what I call success.

(The fact that it turned out to be such a beauty and didn't copy age-old UI concepts, but brought a new one that's years ahead of the one I have to use on my Samsung, makes the success even bigger by magnitudes.)

In other words: There are so many milestones that similar projects in the past never reached and that Jolla successfully passed (usually even in time) that I still can harldy believe what I'm holding in my hands today. (I'm coming from the days when I waited for the Neo1973 to become a consumer-ready, "free" smartphone. I've seen quite a few failures in this business.)

Number of shipments is one additional aspect, and I hope they sell at least enough so they can build a second or even third model. But after all that we've seen in this industry, saying that success only depends on shipments is just so wrong....

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Jolla launch = success
Jolla phone = success and failure
Jolla phone name = failure
Jolla pricing in Europe = failure
Jolla pricing in India = success
Jolla not selling battery = failure
Jolla not deliver any useful Toh = failure
Jolla sales = unknown

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Now that I finally have one, I feel entitled to comment :)

Agree.

Agree. The specs are Just Right™; the "failure" part is convincing Joe Average that it is so.

Strongly disagree. I know Dave is trying to push his - sorry but I have to use that word - idiotic contraption that not only sounds horrible but would also be an invitation for law suits. But I personally think that "Jolla phone" is much catchier than e.g. "Xiaomi M3".

Agree on all 5 accounts.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I'm not sure 'shipments' or even 'profit' is a useful measure early on in a company's life.

From both of those however you can facilitate growth and Jolla don't seem to have grown their staff greatly yet the list of development tasks still to be done is large. I do hope their expansion into new markets improves the shipment and profit as the one that matters to me is seeing the software improve and that requires investment in people.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I'd be shocked if they've sold more than 25k so far, and that's being extremely generous. Given the lack of community activity or interest, and lack of app downloads, if they have achieved that kind of number or in excess of it, then the percentage of inactive phones / users must be MONUMENTALLY high ... and I think we already know it is very high.

I guess it's possible with the sales by DNA in Finland they've exceeded it ... but it just doesn't seem to tally with activity. I visited Finland this summer and went into a couple of DNA shops ... neither had Jollas. Never saw any Finns in Helsinki with Jollas, and most people I talked to casually had no idea what it was (they thought it was an old or maybe unreleased Nokia) when they took notice of the phone. They had no idea what Sailfish was, though all knew of or remembered the N9 / Meego. A couple of more tech savvy people did recognise it, but said they almost never saw people with them, and were amazed that a foreigner had one.

Re: Jolla employees using non-Jolla phones to tweet or as their personal / business phone. Is anyone surprised? Between basic, necessary features still being missing (copy-paste, voicemail notifications etc), terrible connectivity problems when roaming, the awful battery life, and poor e-mail .. it's not exactly a great companion for professionals working in the tech industry, or any industry.

It's not about it being a 'proper Linux OS'. It's just Sailfish, for many people who've bought Jollas or others who might be interested simply isn't viable as a main phone yet, and the hardware is poor quality and low specced which further compounds problems.

I suspect most 'interest in proper Linux' will go straight to Ubuntu once it's released, unless Jolla actually come up with a selling point for Sailfish, or there's widespread adoption by Chinese OEMs. The Meizu MX4, which will receive an Ubuntu ROM in December, and be sold in an Ubuntu version (as opposed to Android) has already had pre-orders exceed 10million. If 1/100 people install and stick with Ubuntu, that's 100,000 users just from the preorders, on one phone (first of many). I really, really don't like the UI and web-appiness that Ubuntu Phone currently has, but Canonical are much more open about development, direction and what's being implemented than Jolla, and whilst the Ubuntu Edge's PR campaign was horrifically mismanaged, their PR machine is much bigger and much smoother than Jolla's, and if they get the mobile flavour into reasonable shape, I'm sure many Ubuntu / Linux desktop users will happily migrate to it.

On the flip side ... Ubuntu and the MX4 ROM run on Libhybris, so porting Sailfish to it *should* be very easy and relatively problem free ... and it's a superb piece of hardware.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Agree, but I feel like they sidetracked themselves with things like the Jolla Launcher (now delayed), TOH and choosing to go with a bespoke (low quality) phone after the ST-E / Ericsson withdrawal instead of a good quality off the shelf design from a Chinese OEM. For such a small company they gave themselves far too much to do, in my view. I hope some of the management issues from the old Nokia didn't creep into the new company, but focus and priorities do seem a little funky.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

IMO it's an inevitable consequence of a company run by geeks. No business acumen. Still, as someone said in another thread, what the big guys would call a failure can be a success for a small startup.

Pulling figures out of a hat: 20k units sold, profit €100 per unit... total profit €2M. I would LOVE to start a company making that kind of profit in the first year.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I don't have any of these problems. copy-paste is only an issue in the Jolla browser. It works everywhere else as far as I can tell. And there's a fix already in git for it so it's coming.

I get voicemail notifications from my carrier just fine - an SMS if someone leaves a message. My SIP provider sends me an email with a WAV file in.

I never have connectivity issues roaming except for at home where I had two access points with the same ID - fixed that by just having two different IDs so no biggie.

The battery life is stellar. I easily get 2+ days whereas an N9 rarely saw me through a working day and always needed a quick charge before going out for a night. It outlives an iPhone 5c even.

Email works fine for me using regular IMAP. It occasionally shows 'email not responding' so it could be faster but otherwise it's reliable.

It could be I've got the perfect collection of 'things that work' but it's pretty good for me. If they fixed CalDAV so it worked with iCloud, implemented CardDAV and added SIP I couldn't think of another thing I'd want as a 'companion for professionals', personally.

I've Ubuntu on one of my laptops. I gave it about 6 months to see if I could ween myself off Macs. I've been using Unix since 1986 on an AT&T 3b2. The Unity UI is bad enough on a laptop but they seem to want to carry much of that over to mobile as well. I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a fork than use Ubuntu again as my primary OS. Sailfish does have a selling point - a UI that isn't developed by Ubuntu.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Maybe they do need more focus but this is their first year with a product and any company is likely to be all over the place.

The Jolla phone doesn't appear to be either massively bespoke or low quality though.

I may be doing the Jolla hardware designers a disservice here but it appears to be pretty much an off the shelf reference design Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 Android handset shoehorned into the shell of the ST-E handset design they had before manufactured by BenQ IIRC. I really don't want to belittle that as I'm perfectly happy with it.

Quality wise, I've had zero issues too but appreciate others haven't had the same experience.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I wish I was as lucky as you seem to have been .. and I think quite a few others might feel similarly, if together.jolla has been any indication.

Re: Ubuntu .. I don't think it's remotely similar to desktop, unfortunately. The unity menu on the side ... it does ... nothing. It's just a few web app bookmarks. Multi-tasking in its current iteration isn't multitasking at all (apps are immediately suspended when not focused), what they mean by multitasking is just an easier to access / deal with task manager, accessed by gesture, than Andoid (or iOS / WP). Somewhere along the line, their vision seems to have lost focus ... the poweful, multi-tasking, smooth UX they originally talked about and envisioned seems to have been replaced with a disjointed mess of web apps and search integration. However I strongly suspect that much of the Ubuntu community will be quite vocal about not finding this acceptable, and it'll be fixed swiftly, or alternate UX schemes will be made and distributed by the community.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

It's not a reference design, though. The components are all commodoties, sure, but the combination of parts and the phone's housing are not shared with other devices. This increases cost considerably (design, lack of bulk orders for components, different assembly line, separate testing) and means that they're guaranteed to have more QC issues. I think the quality of manufacture and materials (not delving into spec sheet) is very sub par for a device of its cost, or one of half the cost.

Think it was BenQ's parent that assemble it. They don't make any high quality phones, that I'm aware of. They tend to specialise in relatively cheap OEM designs which are then cosmetically altered or rebranded by dozens of small players or carriers around the world. Had Jolla gone that route, I think they and we would have got better value. I still find it weird though that they didn't go with one of the top notch Chinese OEMs, especially given their base in HK and obvious hopes in China.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

So Ubuntu have taken the non-multitasking of Windows Phone/iOS and a mash up Firefox's phone UI and Unity?

Yummy. Sign me up.

"However I strongly suspect that much of the Ubuntu community will be quite vocal about not finding this acceptable"

...and do what they did on desktop... install something with a Start menu like Windows XP.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

It's very difficult to see how Ubuntu Phone will turn out, either near or long term. Most of the UX and lack of native apps probably reflects a lack of development focus, as they've taken far longer and had far more blockers to clear at a basic OS level than they hoped.

However they have a deal with a huge Chinese OEM that will almost certainly make it big in the West in 2015, so even if it's a shadow of what it should be, they're going to pick up a few users and a lot of exposure.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I'd be surprised if this was really so.
I find the Jolla device to be just perfect tool for my work and personal needs, in fact I could go as far as claim it is the best phone I ever have owned :)

How do you find out, BTW, the device that they are using fot twitter? Not being a twitter-bird myself I do not know this, is it possible to find from somebody's tweets what was the device?

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Wow, I suspected it would be bad (unstable, slow, full of NiH components), but that it would become this BAD ? :D

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I also use Jolla as my primary mobile computer and don't really have issues with it - it could be improved here and there, but I find it perfectly usable.

(BTW, just a note: I don't use the Jolla for calling & SMS, I have a "proper" phone for that - a Nokia N6610i. Actually I don't really get how someone can use a smartphone for calling - the screen must be sticky all over, it is uncomfortable to hold sucha big thing and do not even get me started on the abysmal battery life inherent to all these newfangled smartphones (Jolla is a bit better than the rest though). ;) )

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I am quite surprised to hear about the suspend in Ubuntu touch (for phones). That right there gives Sailfish a very nice selling point. I enjoyed what I saw of Sailfish's interface and the alien dalvic ability to run some android apps is a nice bonus. I was considering picking up an Ubuntu phone as Jolla has not made a US usable phone, perhaps I still will and if a Sailfish port works on it maybe move towards Sailfish. I'd prefer to buy a phone with the OS I want already on it to make an albeit tiny vote with my dollars. Buying a Nexus 5 is another android sold even if I wipe it and put something else on it. Android interface never really agreed with me and I tend to prefer more of a linux environment. I'm still on my N9 for now.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Usually the tweets will have a footer saying "via APP for xx device" or something similar hence when they announced their existence people were saying they are all N9 fans by using one of the third party apps on the N9 to tweet...

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Maybe sales are not so important.

http://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-nearly...m-care-1513368

Just need a lot of investors!

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I was so excited by the Jolla launch that I paid to go to Finland to collect it. Had a wonderful time too. The interest on this forum was huge.

10 months on and it is very quiet here. The weeks leading up to to an N900 or N9 release would see a torrent of threads and posts. The Jolla updates barely get noticed, I have started the last couple of update threads and even a week and counting delay does not generate much comment.

I stopped using my Jolla as a smartphone when on a weekend break I realised it wasn't up to scratch and i found myself envying other devices and borrowing my wifes phone.

Terrible reception, awful video sound, dim screen that made typing impossible, no sat nav, and struggling to get back to the camera view if i had looked at a picture preview all added up.

Then I don't understand the community aspect any more. Jolla.together is a mess, official announcements seem to be all about India launch and very little on the OS. Exciting initiatives have never arrived and i just feel it has all run out of steam a bit. I have never met another Jolla user in the UK or anyone who has heard of it. ...and still no ability to purchase apps which will stifle Sailfish native apps.

I am amazed, however, at the quality of those who are producing stuff essentially for free. Tweetian, Friends and quite a few others have been brilliant.

I sold my n9 a few weeks back and it still feels like a betrayal, I can't say I have any such feelings for my neglected Jolla.

However I live in hope. Hope that some of the screens and functions seen on the demos back in the launch will be available and that battery % will appear on the largely redundant lock screen and that swiping left or right on that screen may actually do something.

So i hope the ship continues to sail and wish a safe voyage. I may get on board again when the cabins are complete.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Sure there is more anticipation for an update when you don't know whenever it will be released or if it all.

Look at N9 updates, they came about all 6 months and after PR1.2 nobody was sure if PR1.3 would ever arrive. Also you didn't know what will be in the update and if it will fix bug x or bug y which you might have.

With Jolla we already know since a few weeks what will be in update 9. We got informed when it will be released, then we got informed that it got delayed and then we got another information that it won't be released this week. So we will get Update 9 next week.

See the difference? We just don't have anything to talk about.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Yeah, and you could not be sure of that even after the update had launched as there were no freakin changelogs, volunteers had to painstakingly compile incomplete lists of what might have changed and what possibly was corrected :mad:


Yes, and another thing is that the updates just drop by casually "just like that", think about it, this is going to be the 9th in what, 10 months since the device was launched. Remember when Nokia gave us PR1.9 huh? :D

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Sounds like transparency is a bad thing for publicity then. People only talk about companies or products that are kept secret and fed by rumours.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

You've got to be kidding. Have you looked at Active Topics recently? It's a torrent of Jolla related posts. In a forum called talk.maemo.org, a Maemo user feels like an outsider. There was a time I considered leaving the forum for that very reason.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I think his point is more on the developmental aspects of the device instead of bla bla threads like sales, launches etc. Compared to the early days of the n9, I too do feel that the apps and developer interest seems lower. For example name the five most popular apps' threads for the Jolla and you will be hard pressed to do so while for the N9 you could even name 10.

Also his frustration is understandable when coming from a device like the N9 that had many basics covered out of the box or via those relatively quick pr releases whereas even proper native offline navigation is still not covered on the Jolla.

With the launch in India I was thinking of ordering one and getting it shipped via my relatives to Singapore but the massive gaps in the OS and numerous build quality issues have put me off and have decided to keep my S4 as daily driver instead.

This is where I feel Jolla has failed till date; other than the pure GNU/Linux strength it has so many basic flaws that even a fan like me rather waits it out... The mobile world is much more difficult and different now then when the N9 launched so expectations and functions are much higher/different. So to be worse than the n9 in basics is certainly not encouraging.

Anyway that's enough off-topic from an outsider looking in...

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Well, you'll have to experience it to properly appreciate it, I think :)
Have you ever tried the Jolla device, held it in your hand, or are you concerned based on other people's evaluations?

When the device first came out, I have to say I was not so happy with the features, but after 8 cycles of SW updates it is totally different beast now. And still, I hear from people who have heard about it but not used it that "it's the device that has not got even landscape mode in the browser" :D

There might be something in the build quality issues, it feels the quality of devices can vary a lot; For example my device has had none of those problems many people have complained about, and I am not the only one. There are lots of people here who have no need for funny battery tricks or whatever on their devices.


No flaws here, sir :D


Well, My N9's been there on the shelf since last November when I got my Jolla. It's still powered on, of course, and hanging off my WLAN so I can ssh into it to do some hacks now and then, but you can hardly call it a mobile device now. It's just another linux box at my home now.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Update can also be downgrades..happend to jolla users as well as others...but to me its easier to take issues if you are informed about release date, delays and stuff so i think jolla is on the right way, i would even want more info. Good or bad Doesent matter.. https://www.yahoo.com/tech/apple-pul...321257444.html.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

A little OT:

S*itPhone 6+ bends and breaks in your pocket... :D:D

Am I hearing someone to be still complaining about Jollas build quality? :rolleyes:

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

I have no complaints on the hardware, given the price. I was very disappointed by the lack of NFC though and the price for a replacement screen, the latter is of course a volume thing, the more sold the cheaper replacement parts will be.

The fact that Jolla would not do repairs outside of Finland for a while was very poor.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

the funny is... jolla repair your broken screen for 210-230€? (i think i remember to read this price here)

and in India, you get over snapdeal, the complet phone for 210€ :) ... of course, no shipping incl.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Jolla is not the only one having expensive replacement screens. In the past I was in position where I was handling all phone related issues in company. We were using mostly Lumia's but also some Android stuff. There were cases where phones were dropped and screens were broken. Asked for replacement, and it cost more than buying a new phone, so those never got repaired. Basically, if warranty or insurance doesn't cover it, throw it away and buy a new one if you are not prepared to repair it by yourself using some cheap replacement parts from eBay...

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Jolla phone has NFC.
And sure, not doing repairs outside of Finland can be a bummer. But even big companies do it that way. My mum had a Nokia Lumia 820 1,5 years ago. Screen broke without doing anything to make it break and she had to send it for 200 euros to some Nokia Repair Facility in Finland.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

No it does not, not in a usable way. The NFC chip is low power and only used for TOH identification it will not penetrate the outer case.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

NFC payments are possible with Jolla phone so yes, it does penetrate.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

That news may surprise Jolla the company, given the following very explicit comment by Jolla engineer Jonni Rainisto

when specifically asked if any additional NFC functionality might be made available.

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Well, it might be that the NFC is specified low-power, enough just to read the tag next to it but there's nothing that prevents it to be a bit more longrange.

Actually I would be really surprised if it was even possible to tune the output power so precisely that it would reliably read the TOH tag and at the same time be incapable of reading an external tag.
(NFC's designed to be able to read multiple tags in the vicinity simultaneously, BTW)

Re: Jolla Sales/Success?
 

Odd that no one has managed to do that, then, eh?