The thing you can't grasp seems to be that not everyone goes for the average joe. Like the cars I posted, they are marques that go for a specific market, or even part of a market. If you started a new car company today you'd have no remote idea of a chance if you went after Toyota or VW. You don't make a Golf/Corolla competitor for a first car. You choose a niche (fast, big, electric, whatever), you exploit the fans, the people that will try and search for something non-standard, different, and then you clutch on that small marketshare to try and conquer bigger and bigger parts of the pie.

The car analogy works well here, it's a mature market that has settled since long ago, there are all kinds of cars radically different from one another and still there is space for niche manufacturers to get a small piece of the pie. It's even more difficult there as cars are much more expensive and there is a significant cost of ownership of an additional car.

For phones on the other hand there isn't. Between geeks, gadget fans and all those people who will learn about jolla either because they come here, or read engadget every day, there is a pretty big percentage who can afford to buy a second phone. The average joe will probably have never heard of jolla when the phone first gets in the stores. Designing the product for them is a waste of time. Appealing to the people who are actively looking for something different though will work. Due to the complete lack of differentiation in the market (yet. We'll get there, see cars), not being (i|A|W) is enough to sell adequate items to survive another year.

@gerbick, my point is they don't need to convince a non-believer yet. Their china strategy can provide enough first-time smartphone owners, and in Europe people who search for an alternative IMO will be an adequate market for a first product. It might even turn out to be good, because a converted non-believer will be easily discontented, and might be poisonous (see Lumiaman). The already believers will be more forgiving of v1.0 bugs just like we all here have been for the N900 and N9 and will be promoters for v2.0 which will inevitably be designed to appeal to a bigger market.

There are 3 categories in the smartphone landscape right now:
1. Free-for-all, low-end experience, led by android. Android is open but the end user experience is something that can only be compared to Windows for the desktop: full of nagging software, inconsistent UI, zillions of ads everywhere, and Google behind your back, tracking every move of yours. History has proved that this experience is Good Enough™ for the majority of people (90+% of PC users use windows)

2. Walled garden with much higher quality: iOS. The end user experience of iOS is significantly higher but the cost of entry is huge compared to android, and ofc you get your walled garden. WP7 was firmly in this category, but it slowly starts to cover some middle ground.

3. Blackberry tried to cover the middle ground, an OSX of phones, but failed IMO due to other things (delays etc) and because their phones are expensive, not because of their OS.

There is still room for a phone that looks good, feels premium (software wise) in the hands of the user and still does not cost a fortune. Apple showed they are not interested in that market by pricing the 5C too high, so that space is up for grabs.

Lets take BB for example, they have faithful followers, came out with N9 like UI, allowed use of android apps, yet they clearly failed. Reason for failure: lack of apps, not enough good differentiation from established players. Jollla is following the same path, their faithful are tiny compared to BB, they want to allow use of android apps. It seems to me they are headed in the same direction of BB. If you want android apps, buy android, if you want touch screen experience, plenty out there. Jolla specs are no Ferrari specs, hence you can't put them in exceptional sports car category. Now, UBuntu phone tried that, but we know how it ended.

I didn't link to any ferrari Caterham costs significantly less than your average VW golf. But it offers something special, even if you are exposed to nature's whim while driving.

BB10 failed because they overproduced and overpriced. If jolla gets even a quarter of BB10 2 million devices it will be an extraordinary success for them.

BB made more mistakes. They did allow development in a multitude of platforms and frameworks, they even provided a compatibility layer for android, but they forgot to provide a BB7 compatibility layer. Many corporations do not want to re-invest in building their corporate apps, and possibly that is the reason they still sell more BB7 than BB10 devices.

BlackBerry has 12700 employees they gotta feed. Jolla has 80. What is breadcrumbs for a big corporation, might be food for a small one. Going after that demographic might have been disastrous for BB but it might well be the right choice for jolla. See the old reader just after google reader was shuttered. More people than they ever expected to have, or could handle.

And by the way, I would likely buy a Jolla device, as I am a sucker for smartphone innovation and can afford it. However, it is very important to critically examine every venture and Jolla will be unique, no doubt, but I wouldn't call their software premium, given the unfinished OS they produced in maemo 5 and Harmattan. I am very afraid that they are just too lazy to code to perfection. When you are used to iPhone and WP smoothness and delivery, anything else has a very high hurdle to overcome.

Now you are just trolling. Please try to remove background color from a cell in Mobile Office Excel and come back and tell me about unfinished software.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz6buEWRp7w

No trolling. Masses agree. Lazy coders is what made n9 lag, freeze, reboot and SMS threads get mixed....not to even start about the worst email client in the history of phones

Lazy coders is what makes the latest iteration of iOS randomly reboot or freeze or show the blue screen of death. Lazy coders is what made Apple maps create a new airport in Dublin and navigate Alaskans across active runways... the worst maps in the history of phones.

The fact anyone would consider such ineptitude as 'premium' software just shows how pitifully low standards must be. Surely Jolla will have no problems jumping over such a low hurdle.

Wasn't there a conversion process before an Android app could be run on BB10?

Is that what Jolla are proposing?

I dont think anyone knows much about what Jolla proposes. Has anyone had a chance to play and test all the basic functions on this device? YOu can propose a lot, but proposing and putting it in practice are two different things.