There’s also 16GB of internal storage, along with a microSD card slot. The battery is user-accessible, for speedy switch-overs, and there’s some clever intelligence which can recognize which back-cover you clip back on.

Thanks to that, the Jolla can automatically change the color-scheme – as well as fonts, ringtones, profiles, and more – of its interface to match the color of its casing; a little gimmicky, perhaps, but it’s likely to go down well with those who remember Nokia’s XpressOn covers from the pre-smartphone days. Jolla is calling the system “the Other Half” and will offer multiple different casing finishes.

Any new platform needs apps, and Jolla is putting out the call for developers to jump on board its Sailfish OS. However, the Jolla will also run Android apps, which should open the door to a greater number of titles out of the gate. They’re likely to need some tweaking, however, to suit the gesture-based platform.

Jolla isn’t the only company to take elements of MeeGo and reuse them of late. Nokia, for instance, borrowed elements of the UI and the swiping-gesture system for its Asha Platform, debuting on the Asha 501; although not as flexible or powerful as the MeeGo-powered N9, the 501 does have the advantage of being significantly cheaper.

Jolla’s first phone will arrive by the end of the year, the company says, assuming all goes to plan. It’ll be priced at €399 ($513) SIM-free and unlocked.

The homescreen-level interaction, Jolla suggests, means Sailfish will be the most streamlined and speedy OS for users to navigate through. For instance, they’ll be able to pause a song or end an ongoing call without having to open the respective apps themselves: you can swipe a finger across the music player app thumbnail to the left to pause playback, or to the right to skip to the next track.

Sailfish also has a so-called “Pulley Menu” for “fast and effortless interaction” and the open-source SDK is already being fleshed out. It consists of components including Qt, the Mer Core, and the Linux kernel, and can turn its hand to duties on smartphones, tablet, smart TVs, in-car systems, and other applications. Jolla will have a copy of the version shown off today “very soon.”

According to Jolla, many Android apps will run on Jolla devices with no modifications. However, there’ll need to be tweaks made if best use of Sailfish is desired “If you want to take advantage of all UI and other features of Sailfish OS and make yourapplications fast,” the Sailfish SDK wiki explains, ”you can port your applications to native QT/QML.” That’s the full version of Qt, too, along with HTML5, though there won’t be DRM support.

Jolla also has its first carrier onboard, with DNA set to get the first Sailfish-based devices and be part of what the company says will be “a network of partners” around the OS “during the coming year.”

Jolla isn’t content with just one chipset partner, however. “ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor platform combined with Sailfish OS will enable vendors to bring highly competitive mobile products to the market. We welcome other players in the mobile industry to join and contribute to this game changing movement” Jolla CEO Marc Dillon said today. “We also target to announce other chipset provider partnerships soon.”

Update: MTV3 has a hands-on video demo of Sailfish here. [Thanks Kote!]

Jolla is receiving €200 million in funding to develop and release a MeeGo-based mobile operating system codenamed “Sailfish.” The funding will come from a number of different partners in Jolla’s newly-established ecosystem alliance.

Jolla confirmed its upcoming MeeGo OS will be ready for licensing by device manufacturers and service providers by spring 2013. However, the company is planning to put a lot of its focus on the Chinese market. It will have its data center facility located in Hong Kong, where it will store Jolla’s data and provide cloud services, and they plan on conducting most of their research and development in Hong Kong as well.

The upcoming MeeGo OS will be completely open-source, and Jolla says that the new OS will be immune to constant patent wars that are saturating the mobile market. Jolla’s head Jussi Hurmola says that the patent lawsuits between Samsung and Apple are actually benefiting the company, since they’re based on an independent operating system and are said to be implementing a completely new UI.

[via ZDNet]

The company plans to do so via an application compatibility layer. That will allow apps to run without any issues on MeeGo, with OpenMobile, the company behind the ACL, saying that there’s no performance loss. Apps should also behave correctly as the software makes use of the Android runtime environment and Dalvik virtual machine, allowing for full compatibility.

Jolla also revealed that its first smartphone will come with a screen size of 3.5-inches, an interesting move given the shift in the market towards larger screens on smartphones. Even the upcoming iPhone is rumored to have a larger screen size, coming in at 4-inches compared to the 3.5-inch size used on previous iPhones. Bigger isn’t always better, however, and plenty of consumers are happy with the 3.5-inch form factor: Jolla could be looking to take advantage of that, and there’s nothing stopping the company releasing multiple devices with different sizes.

Jolla is comprised of ex-Nokia employees looking to leverage the MeeGo operating system, with the company formed at the beginning of July. Nokia only managed to get one MeeGo phone out of the door, the Nokia N9, before switching over to Windows Phone for the Lumia 800 and 900. Jolla has faith in the MeeGo operating system, believing that development “deserves to be continued”. How much success the company will have in an already crowded market remains to be seen.

UPDATE: Arctic Startup mistranslated the original article, noting that Jolla’s first smartphone will in fact have a screen larger than 3.5-inches. An exact size wasn’t given, however.

[via fonearena]

Not surprisingly, Hurmola points to an already available app that seems to be on just about every device on the planet, Angry Birds, but he went on to recognize the importance of a healthy app store. In addition to releasing details about its upcoming phone, Jolla has pledged to inform the world about the availability of upcoming applications. The phone is currently on track for a release later on in the year, although Hurmola doesn’t guarantee Christmas availability.

Interesting, Jolla doesn’t want the phone to be as open as some Android devices, saying that the kernel will be locked down and that customers won’t be able to flash their own software. Jolla intends the phone to appeal to the mass market, hoping to create a phone “almost everybody would want for themselves.” Good luck to the company: it certainly has a uphill battle ahead, with the likes of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone to compete with.

UPDATE: It looks like something was lost in translation regarding the phone’s hackability. Jolla plans to offer a developer edition of its phone on top of the retail version, allowing developers and hackers to tinker with the system that should spur development for the platform.

[via International Business Times]