Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

http://qz.com/32922/here-comes-the-first-real-alternative-to-iphone-and-android/

by SethMurphy • 14 years ago

31 52 14 years ago

whalesalad2• 14 years ago

No way. The UI is a gimmick. Watch the video.

Seeing him use it does not lead me to believe this will make my life better at all. There are far too many intricate gestures and complex interactions.

This UI does not solve any problems. The interactive tiles that are essentially miniature versions of the full app are just noisy. Part of the beauty of this new mobile experience that recent smartphones have cultivated is modal interaction. One app for one thing. I launch my music app and it's full screen with large touch buttons that are easy to use. I switch to another app to immerse myself in reading or responding to emails.

I never need to do this from my homescreen, let alone see or interact with all of it at once.

The ambient photo stuff is neat but also entirely useless.

Nothing about this is radical. It's just a layer of more playful paint on yet another mobile platform.

Why is everyone so fucking concerned with multitasking?

My android-fanboy buddy showed me something the other day that made me chuckle. He says, "dude, look at this." He proceeded to load a video from the media library, and started to play it in some kind of picture-in-picture mode where it was floating above everything else on the phone. Then he tells me, "how cool is this?! you can use your phone while the video plays." my simple response, to which he had no answer: "when is that useful?" It's not! And he proceeded to admit that, albeit with his tail between his legs. I didn't say that to be an asshole, I just think that these days people are far too excited about gimmicks and useless customizations. He then went on to say something like "well what about if you want to watch a youtube video and also reply to some text messages?" ... society is doomed.

whatshisface• 14 years ago

>"when is that useful?"

I would like to be able to listen to youtube music videos while doing other tasks.

pkulak3• 14 years ago

It doesn't work for Youtube. Only videos on the device. It's a joke.

daliusd6• 14 years ago

Then you will love BB10. At least you can do this on PlayBook therefore I believe BB10 will allow that as well.

jasonkolb2• 14 years ago

"Why is everyone so fucking concerned with multitasking?"

Some of us can do more than one thing at a time, some things I do require it. Don't be so myopic.

douglasisshiny• 14 years ago

Actually, current scientific evidence says otherwise.

viraptor• 14 years ago

Actually I'd like it if I could respond to an incoming message over whatever app is running right now, without switching away. This would be useful for videos, games without a proper pause state saving, almost any application really.

There's also the problem that comes up every other week for me: the phone number I want to call is in a picture / not selectable / selecting is completely broken due to some onmouseover handler. It still happens from time to time and I really wish I had an ability to see both apps (the one with the information and the dialer) at the same time.

Video over other things seems less useful though...

So yes, I'd like to see a little bit easier multitasking because not all apps/pages are properly taking advantage of the UI possibilities yet. And I'm talking about simple things like href=tel:...

alien_acorn• 14 years ago

If you are on Android, try Hovernote to address the unselectable phone number case. Type the number into the hovering note, then copy/paste from the note.

pkulak3• 14 years ago

Please don't call Samsung gimmicks "Android". Nothing Samsung has ever shoehorned into Android has been useful.

And efficient multi-tasking _can_ be very nice. For example, Android has a dedicated app-switching button. One tap shows you a list of your last-used apps, about 5 visible without scrolling. It makes it insanely fast to swap between apps. On iOS you have to double tap a physical button. If not that, then you can tap it once and select your next app from the home screen. The problem now is that because that one button has been overloaded, it always has to wait and make sure there's no second tap coming before it can take you to the springboard. That small delay is pretty annoying once you get used to Android, which isn't limited to one button.

mannkind• 14 years ago

Really? Is it really that different to double tap a hardware button than it is to tap one? You must feel the same way about single-vs-double clicking a mouse then, I suppose ... because it's the exact same thing.

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

I haven't used a Sailfish device so I can't say how useful it is or is not. But you are dead wrong about there not being use cases to having information on your homescreen. I'm currently using a WP8 device and "pinning" is very useful there.

Here's an example I used today. I ordered tickets to a movie on Fandango and then pinned the receipt to my homescreen so that when I went I got to the theater I could easily bring up the QR code and print out my tickets.

I also use pinning when I'm traveling and have restaurants, attractions, etc. that I want to check out pinned to the start screen. It's immensely valuable.

whalesalad2• 14 years ago

I don't doubt you. In fact, I agree with you in the usefulness of having a dynamic home screen. That being said ... I disagree that each of those little things should be interactive to the level that they are on Sailfish. Not only that, but it appears to be one of their main selling points. I'm not sold.

For the record, I like Windows Phone and prefer it to Android.

merlincorey• 14 years ago

As an emacs user, I don't think modal is the one true way. Nothing in emacs is modal (though focus will switch on its own when required, you can move back to where you were if needed).

mtgx• 14 years ago

The UI doesn't seem like any radical departure. Even the BB10 UI is probably more radical than that. I do like the fact that it's another open source Linux OS, but for now I'm rooting more for Firefox OS, even though it's yet to be seen if it will perform as well as Mozilla claims on low-end devices.

But I've noticed Firefox OS has given Mozilla a lot of incentives to create new advanced HTML5 API's, and I like that. So the more they can keep up the Firefox OS project alive, the better.

Tichy• 14 years ago

Is it not possible to implement swipes on Android widgets?

ok_craig• 14 years ago

I know I can scroll the Calendar widget vertically. Don't know about horizontal for other widgets.

ChrisClark• 14 years ago

Did they happen to take a look at the phone market in China? They think it's the only way to go, but unfortunately Android got there first. Open source and free. Everything is going Android there, their own app stores too.

Unless they are releasing it for free too then I doubt they will overtake Android in China.

gbraad2• 14 years ago

Yes, Android is the first mover in the market and also iOS is quite dominant in the rich areas (BeiShangGuangShen). It is the toughest market to deal with, even with the help of D.Phone... why? They would have to compete with local brands like Meizu and Xiaomi (Android) which release good quality for an affordable price. I expect Jolla wants to aim for the richer group of people, like Vertu does(/did)... but these does not shop at D.Phone...

herval3• 14 years ago

No.

There's a lot of options on the mobile space already (iOS, Android and WM8) - which, IMHO is enough (not to mention BB, FirefoxOS, WebOS, Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia)...

bergie2• 14 years ago

I don't think the prize for the 3rd place has been given out yet. Possible contenders are BlackBerry, Bada, and WP. Symbian still sells ok-ish, but is clearly a dead end. And then there are some new players including Tizen, Sailfish, and Firefox OS.

Personally, I'd like to see a properly open alternative do well. Firefox OS would be the best for the web, and Sailfish for Linux in general.

herval3• 14 years ago

Thanks for remembering Bada :-)

I totally agree there's still a sort of draw for who the third one will be, but I think it's quickly converging towards WP8 due mainly to Nokia's bet on it...

gbraad2• 14 years ago

> Firefox OS would be the best for the web, and Sailfish for Linux in general.

Agree to this... users do not care about Linux and often has a negative feel among the masses in China; the try to be Windows when you can get the real stuff for 'free'. They care more about access to service and being able to do the same as their friends/colleagues, play games, access to 微信 (weixin, wechat), 微博 (weibo), etc. For this the compatibility layer might come in handy, since without it is hard to find the users.

Note: Blackberry and Bada are not really contenders in China. WP maybe, but purely due to the looks of the phone (eg Lumia), but was faced with no store access in China for a long time.

rurounijones• 14 years ago

"Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia" is dead, it was killed by Elop.

Sailfish (The software being demo'd) is created by a group of ex "Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia" devs and is based on that codebase - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS

herval3• 14 years ago

They're still releasing some Maemo phones, afaik, no?

All in all, being a Microsoft hater or not, I believe it was a good move, though. Symbian was an old messy pile, and Maemo was just... bad.

readme• 14 years ago

It's meego.

bergie2• 14 years ago

Well, actually Mer, the MeeGo spin-off http://merproject.org/

Some background on this whole Maemo/MeeGo/Sailfish story http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/

Spherical3• 14 years ago

They aim to crack China and their reasoning is that the big players haven't got a foothold yet due to being a young-ish market.

At the same time they are looking to developers to create native apps for it and hardly anyone is going to develop for a phone if their primary market is China where 99.9% people steal.

goldfeld• 14 years ago

"China where 99.9% people steal."

That's a pretty sweeping statement not to be backed by a source with a figure even remotely resembling 99.9%.

Spherical3• 14 years ago

Source: A friend IOS App collecting analytics data. Sure, I could make it up but that is the data he got back.

general_failure• 14 years ago

The UI is pathetic. Why are people so bent on such complex gestures? Scroll up for this, scroll down for that, two finger slide up for another thing. Seriously?

xemacs has a cult following and so will sailfish. But you know how xemacs will do in the "market".

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

That demo video is terrible. If it really has anything new in it's UI, that guy failed miserably at demonstrating it. Changing the background/ambience is one of the pillars of a "more personal user experience", really?

I'd like to understand why this Quartz guy is jizzing all over this company, but the article doesn't help either.

trolloss• 14 years ago

> I'd like to understand why this Quartz guy is jizzing all over this company

Probably been promised a free phone: wait until he gets an old N9 as demo phone without DIY flash instructions.

jasonkolb2• 14 years ago

In contrast to others here I actually kind of liked it. I really dug the idea of making app icons interactive and useful, it's an intelligent use of limited real estate.

Also, I'm not sure if it's just novelty or actually more intuitive, but I really liked how the icon grid scrolls vertically rather than horizontally. Maybe it's because of the aspect ratio of mobile screens but it just looked more intuitive to my eye.

elteto• 14 years ago

"...a real alternative to iPhone and Android"

There is something about this title that just incites a negative reaction from me. To me, it implies that the current available options are broken beyond repair and that a "savior" is coming to liberate us from them, and boy... do I hate self-proclaimed saviors, especially in the tech area.

Android/iPhone/WP7/Mozilla OS/$xyz are the options we have, and we don't need a real alternative to them anymore than we need anything else. New mobile OS coming up? Great, competition benefits me, the end user, since my devices just keep getting better. But please don't pretend to be something that you are not.

daliusd6• 14 years ago

I guess headlines was written by journalist anyway. Actually you try to read more from headline than it actually states.

cmccabe• 14 years ago

Some day, we'll look back on the days of a mobile OS being announced every few months and chuckle.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-01-13/

nimdahk• 14 years ago

So... the big innovation here is "widgets." Something that android has had for years.

jarcoal• 14 years ago

I really think these tile widgets are not useful or easy to understand for an average user.

Apple has it right: iOS is just an app launcher, and there is just one tier of apps, none of this widget-y stuff.

I will note that small read-only changes can be beneficial to the user (calendar shows current day in icon), but I wouldn't dare make someone try and interact with that.

daliusd6• 14 years ago

Well, why everyone should please "average user"?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2012/07/21/finlands-j...

pratfall• 14 years ago

This is off topic, but if your website requires Javascript for me to read a text article, fuck you.

film42• 14 years ago

Even if someone considers this a 'better' UI than iOS or Android (I personally don't), there's no point in switching because as soon as you do, that $200+ you've spent over the last 4 years on apps is gone forever and you'll only get less quality software as their replacement (if they exist). Apple and Android don't just shoot for a 'sexy' look, they create thousands of docs and demos from their SDK for the developers who then create hundreds of thousands of tutorials to help other developers learn quicker. They then spend millions of dollars and millions of hours creating the next big thing. The successes of iOS and Android are not awarded to a design firm, they are given to us.. the developer ecosystem and for that reason, this will never be a real alternative... at least not for a long time.

halostatue3• 14 years ago

Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines

It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless.

1. They have no production as of yet. 2. They have no carrier partners as of yet. 3. They have a retail partner who will sell the phones—if the carriers approve them.

The claim is that the retail partners control the mobile relationship with the carriers in China, but that would greatly surprise me. It's not impossible, but colour me skeptical.

It's also my understanding that Europeans don't necessarily get subsidized phones, either—but they still (nominally) control which phones are allowed on their networks.

It gets worse later in the article where it suggests that the carriers and handset manufacturers are going to have even more freedom to modify the base OS than Android manufacturers do. This alone guarantees that Sailfish will not be a viable platform—you will become as locked into a single manufacturer for any app you buy just like you did with "feature" phones that had BREW or JME games & apps.

The suggestion that Sailfish avoids patent infringement is also laughable: there's so many patents out there that I suspect that absolutely no one can write software that doesn't infringe on something these days. They think that they've avoided patent infringement (just as Google does with WebM), but until someone decides to sue over an alleged patent infringement, no one knows whether Jolla would win.

There's an interesting bit buried in the story, too: they have changed CEOs at least once. The current CEO is Marc Dillon; he attained that post in October when Jussi Hurmola stepped down and became a consultant to the company. Hurmola is supposedly looking after the Sailfish ecosystem. According to what I saw on LinkedIn, Hurmola may have only had the CEO position for as little as eight months, but possibly as much as eighteen (Jolla was founded in March 2011). For a startup with big ambitions, I would want as much stability at the top as possible, personally.

daliusd6• 14 years ago

Where do you collect your facts? I'm not even sure if you don't have bad intentions with your comment. It would be nice from your side to state your relation to Jolla (e.g. competitor)

1. Headline was written by journalist not by Jolla. OK I got it wrong. You are negative to journalist, right?

2. You are most probably right about production but you simply don't know. You are wrong about carrier partners: they have one in Finland (http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/11/21/jolla-signs-first-ca...) and one in China.

2. Europeans can get subsidized phones but don't have to. You can use any phone if you manage to get one. I even used one phone that is not for production just fine (N950).

3. I doubt that lock is an issue here. You basically can reflash your phone with pure OS if you want to - like you can reflash your N9 with Mer now.

4. I almost agree with you regarding patents but idea is that Jolla has its own patent portfolio gifted to them by Nokia.

5. Hurmola according to LinkedIn still works for Jolla. As well they are not hiding why CEO was changed - they are quite transparent regarding that. Sorry, but don't find that now.

I'm not related to Jolla in any way. I'm (mobile) developer who believes that Jolla will succeed.

halostatue3• 14 years ago

I have no relation to Jolla at all—neither competitor or likely customer. At the moment, I'm not doing any direct mobile development (we will be offering something for mobile in the future, but this is not affected by the existence or absence of Jolla). My entire relationship with Jolla is reading this nonsensical article and writing my comment with a bit of simple (short) research.

1. Yes, the journalist (or his editor) is lazy here. However, they probably wouldn't cast the article in such a stark light without prompting from Jolla.

2a. Happy to admit that I was wrong here; the article contained no information about these relationships, and Jolla’s website is essentially content free.

2b. I addressed this (mostly) in a reply to a sibling comment. My point here was that (again) the journalist was lazy-to-irresponsible for pretending that China is different because of the lack of subsidy.

3. Unless Jolla exerts some control over the handset manufacturer and/or the carriers that offer Sailfish phones, which Jolla has explicitly said that they aren't going to do, users will not (necessarily) have the freedom to reflash their phone. This is the problem with Android: there have been both manufacturer locks and carrier locks that prevent timely receipt of updates (including security updates) or OS management of your own phone. You have to root and/or jailbreak your phone to make this happen, and some phones actively fight that (e.g., one of the Motorola phones that I remember a big stink about).

4. Having a nice set of defensive patents gifted by Nokia (hopefully it's done properly so they can use them for defence, rather than merely having a licence to them) is useful, but is not the same as the claim in the article that the are immune to any existing patents. Some of the claims made by Samsung regarding radios clearly indicate that this is not the case.

5. I looked for the CEO change info on Jolla's remarkably content-free website. I couldn't find it. Hurmola's relationship to Jolla (as noted on LinkedIn) is limited to being on the board, as the transition notes that I did find was related to looking after the Sailfish ecosystem. What I found interesting is that it's not clear to me how long Hurmola was CEO—and again, there's remarkably little information. Regardless of why the change was done, I'd be a little skeptical as a partner about the changes at the top with as little transparency as they exhibit.

I'm neither positive nor negative toward Jolla itself: I think it will fail, but I don't want them to fail. I'm deeply negative to this horrendously awful uncritical article. It's roughly the equivalent of a news report from Fox News, CNBC, or cnet, or an analysis by Rob Enderle.

unicornporn• 14 years ago

> It's also my understanding that Europeans don't necessarily get subsidized phones, either—but they still (nominally) control which phones are allowed on their networks.

Europe is not a nation. It differs from country to country. Sweden has both subsidized and no contract phones.

halostatue3• 14 years ago

Thank you for stating the obvious. This is why I said "…don't necessarily get…".

I knew it would vary from country to country and carrier to carrier. The original article suggested that China was different because the phones were bought without subsidy. In reality, it's not that different because a phone subsidy isn't guaranteed in European mobile markets. All I was doing here is calling out the laziness of the so-called journalist.

Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

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