Supply chain has left us.

Since there's no new development happening with small phones, we'd have to settle for "older spec" screens (IE, new stock iPhone 5 screens, with none of the colour accuracy, frame-rate etc improvements from the last 10 years).

People don't like "old spec", so they'd probably not buy those devices.

If you're a small player, then you're downstream of the supply chain, you don't make the rules.

Chicken and Egg problem.

Ironically people think there's no market for small phones due to apple making a "small phone" which had a larger screen size than an iPhone 6.. which was when phones started getting too big for me, and many people I spoke to.

So, you make a small phone that isn't actually small, it sells like poop so you presume that people don't want small phones..

What about those of us that were expecting an earpiece and glasses with AR for calling by now?

Every now and then some phone manufacturer mistakes online sentiment for actual demand and gets burned making a mini phone that won’t sell

I hope not. Projects like that to have any chance at surviving have to be good phones first. Adding modularity will make it worse in terms of specs, more expensive and in the result dead on arrival. Once they launch a few successful (or at least sustainable) products, they can maybe try doing some modularity

Am I the only one who just feels burnt out on these type of projects? We have a plethora of raspberry pi and other arm mobile developer kits that all just fail to deliver. They make great pet projects but fail at what most mobile phones do great which is provide a computer I can reliably and safely take with me in life. This pilet thing has 7 hours of battery life, is huge and will probably explode if I put it in my bikes bag.

While it's not perfect I've been investing more time into learning to live with grapheneOS. I can run Emacs and clang on the go. It's a better start that won't turn into a paperweight.

The PinePhone has 6 dip switches for this 1. modem, 2 Wifi/BT, 3. Mic 4, rear cam, 5. front cam, 6. headphone / serial port. They say it will stay in production for 2 more years, but a lot of the accessories (LoRa cover, keyboard, etc) are already gone.

If nothing else it is a fun platform to hack on. I'm currently hacking a toy OS for it, and the documentation for the SoC is fairly complete. I'd love an updated phone like this Jolly orange Jolla to hack on, but not at that price, and seems like it might be locked down.

If it catches traction, there will be usb-connected phone cases that expose these switches to physical controls.

Can you explain this a bit more? What is closed about it?

Source please.

They have a history of not shipping. They took my money for a tablet pre-order but never shipped anything. Didnt offer refunds either.

> As an American, I will order this phone as soon as it’s available to me!

It won’t be. From the time of their first phone the company actively made the choice to not support the US market. There’s the obvious spectrum difference and cost to certify, but the real reason they don’t want to touch it is litigation risk on patents and whatnot.

All phones end up reliant on proprietary blobs. Not that I disagree in principle, but we have to be realistic. Hardware manufacturers, telcoms and to some degree regulators all do not like user freedom with regards to phones.

In 2013 they released the Jolla 1, a phone with custom hardware and Linux software. In 2015 they tried again with a tablet, but it failed on the side of hardware production and the company became insolvent.

In 2017 there came investors, among others ROS Telecom, a Russion telecom provider. They pivoted to only providing software, mainly on Sony phones. That is still ongoing.

Since the Russia - Ukraine war the Russion investors went MIA. The Finnish people from Jolla started a new company and had all assets moved to that company. They are now trying to rebuild the company and apparently extend into hardware again, even though the PCB design is off the shelf.

I have been a user since 2014 and am quite happy with their offering. It offers ssh root access if you want. Optionally manually installing software. Very much a GNU/Linux experience. Privacy focused and user oriented. And now slowly but surely there are parts of the software being opensourced.

No, you're right. SailfishOS inherits the core of the OS from the old Maemo of Nokia N900 fame (though the UI was built from scratch I believe). I tried it back in the day on my Nexus 4 and it was buttery smooth, even with all its fancy animations and gesture-based navigation, which was way ahead of Android at the time.

I always thought SailfishOS would really take off by now, given how advanced and polished it already was at the time, but Jolla's mismanagement nearly jeopardised the whole thing (they filed for bankruptcy last year).

They have been selling Sailfish X for selected Sony Xperia devices for years.

yep...

my lenovo laptop has a physical privacy switch for the camera... it's literally a piece of plastic that covers the lens, no way to bypass that (without physical access). I feel safe.

If it can be enabled in software, it can be disabled in software, and I don't trust software.

I have it - Wayland, BTRFS, RPM and systemd on a phone - in 2013!

Why did it not set the wolrd on fire back then ? Ruthless monopoly building on both Google and Apple side IMHO.

It's a great success Jolla still exists and does its thing. :-)

I have both the original and the C model they released in 2017.

https://sailfishos.org/

Isn't it SailfishOS? It shouldn't be too hard to find screenshots/screencasts. I just hope it has good mainline kernel support.

Although the SFOS community did express some interest in the 3.5 mm jack in the polls earlier, there's no headphone jack. The expected device sales volume probably would not cover the added engineering cost from such modifications to the mainboard reference design at the announced price point.

Some time ago I also thought that no 3.5mm jack is a deal-breaker, but I bought super cheap jack-usbc adapter that is 5cm long and it works pretty well.

”I hate Whatsapp, but it's not optional”

Yes it is.

That shouldn't be a problem as long as you can still download apps from the Play Store itself (not the official app). Basically, take a look at how proxy stores like Aurora work, they connect to the Play Store servers and allow you to download apps directly from Google, without needing the Play Store app.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the downloaded app will work on such a device (if it doesn't have Google Play Services), but at least it lets you download the app, which isn't much different from downloading it from say, APK Mirror. And as long as you can extract the apps from either the Play Store or Android devices itself (via adb/root etc), I'm assuming sites like APK Mirror will continue to exist.

Most people aren't willing to sacrifice half their screen real estate 100% of the time, or deal with a significantly thicker phone, just to get a physical keyboard. The market for that is very small.

But destroyed the interest of many others ;)

Keyboard phones are a great thing, but not as the sole option for a company. As a second current model, sure.

eh, I was a Smartphone ‘it's gotta have a keyboard!’ hold-out too, but I've long-since embraced the Swype or whatever it's called, style of input. It's fine enough for 90% of my engagement with the internet via a phone. Anything more in depth I'm on a computer with a physical keyboard anyway.

But yes, the N900 was pre-slidey-smartphone peak brilliance.

Out of all the OS's on which you'd have to hack on a bluetooth implementation, I feel like a mostly vanilla linux is the best one you could hope for. [edit] If it's not obvious from my previous phrasing, I'm referring to Sailfish OS.

It uses Bluez for bluetooth connections. Or maybe that's what you meant ;) Bluetooth is a hack anyway.

Hmm, I at least received a refund on the tablet; I think half of it was paid out and half of it I opted to use as payment for Sailfish X.

An email I have stored from July 4th 2017 mentions "the tablet refund tool", so there seems to have been a concrete system for this refunding process as well. I abstractly remember something like that, though I must say my memory is shoddy and should not be trusted.

As someone that's contributed to the Jolla tablet foundraiser, I mostly got refunded when they canceled it. It took a long time, it was not directly the money I contributed, but I wasn't left with nothing, and I don't feel like I've been cheated. YMMV, of course, it sounds like you're talking from experience.

afaik the tablet was in development hell for much of 2015, by the time it was ready it was no longer profitable and Jolla couldn't afford to buy more than about 600 units without going bust.

> leaving backers with no tablets and most with no refund.

I'm pretty sure we eventually all got refunds after they got the Russian cash. My refund came a couple years later iirc, with a check for half the amount coming a few months before the check for the second half.

For a company of their size that has to compete in the tech market of today, I'm surprised they're able to produce updates for the OS as regular as they do.

Blaming they can't keep up with user requests, granted reasonable ones, is a little short sighted in my opinion. If we want to break the Apple/Google duopoly we need to be able to bear a couple of paper cuts. If you wait for perfection before committing they'll just end up going out of business. :(

I would not sey they are ignorant - rather, some things are unfortunately just not possible with their staffing and budget. Connecting Android bluetooth blobs compiled against bionic libc via glibc Linux distro to a container running Android emulation is one of these things.

Sailfish OS is better than GrapheneOS through virtue of being mostly a vanilla linux distribution with Android being just an optional bad dream.

Well, that could help drive the production numbers up, hopefully driving the per unit price down. :)

You probably never used Maemo, whose UI (and also Palm's WebOS UI) were ripped off for later versions of Android and iOS, which wasn't even multitasking yet. Literally hired the same people to do them. Jolla started with the FOSS parts of Maemo but went proprietary.

If Nokia hadn't been intentionally destroyed by its board in a romance with Microsoft cash, through a Canadian snake, Maemo would have been a real contender. You can get an vague idea what it looked like from here: https://maemo-leste.github.io/

Also, I don't know what's motivating you to just make negative shit up from whole cloth. Where did Linux touch you?

Nobody has confused Jolla with Volla, mostly because nobody has ever heard of Volla.

And to my eternal puzzlement here's two companies that are made for one another and so far they've never worked together on a project. SMH...

we need a .olla TLD