Yea, the Tomi guy..

That is a ****** jaw line! very impressive.

Hey Dave, i heard you like large so we put large in your barge...

No seriously, by the time Jolla (maaybe) delivers, Chinese lower production-volume, premium brands like Oppo, Meizu & Xiaomi (which after their 3 years of existence is still a small, privately-owned firm) will have churned out another generation of high-end devices, at minimum. Just like this example; the Mi2 came out IIRC around10/2012, the MI2S upgrade came end of April.

Yeah, but they will run android.

...and? Given that Qt5 now runs on Android too, i can't see too many objections existing (outside of Halmstad, that is).

Lets see them try to build a entire dev platform, OS, web infra, it goes on & on & on...
That's far more tricky than tacking the most premo hw into a tweaked/modded Android.

5,5 is to small for me now unless it offer something extra. 3gb is great but nothing i will trade my new lowend phone galaxy mega 6.3 for. Waiting for note lll and sony to make there moves. Think they will be awsome untill. Jolla,tizen or ubuntu launching a phone for real men

Uh oh... may i point you do the fact that for at least one of those firms (it starts with an 'X', i'm not too familiar with the others), there in fact is a whole cloud service infrastructure (including synchronization, backup, and payment processing) that's _not_ hogging onto Google's service hosting train? That they have enough employees to provide updates _every Friday_?

Giving that most of Jolla's homework is done by other groups too (so-called 'communities') that care for the actual development of base OS, frameworks, and SW components, i can't see that they realistically have to care for building much from scratch, besides their (closed-source by the way) UI components and related integration.
Further, it was mentioned most of their guys came with an Maemo and N9 projects background; so it's even more moot thaey have to start from scratch. They are definitely able to leverage their expertise here and shorten their cycles.

And unless someone close to them can prove that they designed all of their hardware in-house, i bet there's a huge re-use of COTS board-level components going way farther that basic SoC reference designs.

And how many people are Jolla now, like 50? I bet they are steering towards 80. (sorry, can't be arsed to grep their Twitter musings for that...)
That's not a startup; size-wise.

I would be really suprised if the hardware wasn't completly or nearly completly off the shelf generic chinese ODM stuff.

Android = lack of real multitasking, which is a joke when using quad core devices @ 1,5-2,5 GHz.