What would be best regarding mass storage is if I could partition the SD card and define one for it that would live unmounted. Then I could use the device the way ste-phan suggests, use MTP as well. So, best of both worlds.

I've only had it since Tuesday so this is based on rather short time with it.

Lets start with noting that I'm glad that I bought it. One finnish reviewer called it rough & uncut diamond, and I think that is pretty good way of describing it. I think that most people on this forum, who have Maemo/Meego background, would like it as well.

But I don’t think that it’s really yet ready for the wider consumer market. Still too many things that would brake the experience for the (in)famous average consumer. For example, the browser was pretty much on alpha-stage before the latest update. Now its something like semi-usable beta software. The Yandex store app is also very buggy. I still cant get it to work and I know that there are many users with same problem. It would cause lots of trouble to people with no knowledge of how to get apps elsewhere. The Jolla appstore has way too few items for the mass market consumer. I’ve also noticed frustrated questions from users on finnish forums about pretty basic functionality that they just can’t figure out, like how to set an alarm (clock app -> upper menu -> set new alarm).

My personal main gripes are the browser, the way that Android apps ‘break’ the Sailfish UI, lack of LTE, camera and lack of landscape. Most of the great multitasking UI & functionality is wasted at the moment because of having to use Android apps. For example, swiping to close an Android app will close all Android apps. Annoying as hell since I just got used to swiping. Closing Firefox kills my Spotify stream as well. So now I’ve to somehow remember which apps to swipe and which not.

The positives do however definitely weigh more than negatives in my case. But I think it turns out to be a good thing that Jolla has only one retail partner in one small market. They get time to even out the kinks and hopefully it will be ready for wider audiences when/if they get more distribution deals.

It is mounted all the time when it is in its place, so it is risky to remove it when the phone is powered on.

If the phone happens to be writing to the card (applications writing, updating metadata, updating access times) when removing it, there is a real risk of corrupting the file system or the flash itself.

So I wouldn't do it live, but if you want to live on the edge

whats wrong with sftp/bt transfers?

Device is /dev/mmcblk1p1 and it is mounted as /run/user/100000/media/sdcard as VFAT with codepage cp437 and charset ISO 8859-1, at least with FAT formated cards.

Apps don't offer possibility to write to the microSD card at the moment. Hopefully in the future. Tracker is following the card so stuff that you put there is available to all apps that utilize the tracker data.

I have made a symlink from nemo user's home directory to microSD card so that I can access the card with the MTP PC connectivity:

ln -s /run/user/100000/media/sdcard /home/nemo/sdcard


Good quality 64G cards are so expensive that I didn't see any reason to buy one. I bought 32G Kingston with SD adapter so that I could connect the same card with my laptop computer without the phone if needed.

Many PCs just don't have bluetooth at all.

SFTP is out of this world for the average consumer. Have you ever seen anyone who's not a nerd use it?

My use case is quite simple: I want to transfer just any file (text, image, audio, windows executable, spreadsheet, powerpoint...) to my phone from a PC or laptop and retrieve it later from another PC. I was not prepared for the situation, so I didn't set up any application on the phone to support me. Also, I have no control over the 2 PCs in question, nor can I be sure that I can join the same network they are in.

That's the good old USB-stick use case. Only that I never carry a USB stick because all of my phones support at least USB mass storage. I don't see any other way than USB mass storage for this typical use case.

pkcon search doesn't seem to find any NFS or SAMBA related packages (standard+mer-tools) so it might be that Jolla doesn't support those without somebody else compiling and packaging those for Jolla.

Got a Transcend 64GB for 35 euros on Amazon.fr... Let see if it's a good one...

Slow (SFTP) and very slow (BT).

That being said, I connect my N9 in mass-storage mode only if I have to transfer >10GB of data.

Apart from speed, mass-storage is still very useful when you need to use your phone as a USB flash memory, especially with devices that have no idea of what MTP (which is also far slower than direct USB transfer) is like many 'smart'-TVs and such.

I don't understand the mounting argument - I mean I understand it, I worked on a custom FS so I have pretty good understanding on what's going on beneath - I'm just saying it's not an argument. Most modern file systems (and storage devices) support journaling with transactions, advanced queuing and smart cache so the argument 'you need to unmount a partition to make it available to other systems' is pretty moot. There is pretty much no reason to limit file access to one host only these days - FFS, databases have been going at it for decades now - so why not have it both ways?

Well, apart from legacy reasons and "don't fix it if it ain't broken" mentality (and it is broken in this particular instance). Sure thing, allowing such thing won't make the above mass-storage problem (legacy) solved, but there is no real reason why ext4 cannot be extended (it just needs a bit smarter journaling) to allow mounting by multiple hosts. Then you can stick an ext4<->FAT translation layer on top of it for legacy purposes and be done with it.

I have been happy. There has been some challenges, bugs and missing features but I like the natural touchscreen UI, visuals, speed, terminal access. No show stoppers yet. It has been a good adventure.

The most annoying thing for me has been that the SMTP sending doesn't work for my service provider. I have temporarily worked around this by using Gmail account to send all my emails out. The next after that is that I cannot select the regional settings like in N900/N9. I have selected English as a language so I'm getting the UK units which I don't want. After that I think the next one would be missing landscape option in the browser.

Other bugs and missing features have been more minor problems for me.