Hasta La Gadget!

Jolla, the Finnish startup that’s aiming to build a mobile ecosystem around its MeeGo-based OS, Sailfish, has announced the Sailfish OS is now compatible with the Android ecosystem — on both a hardware and a software level.

Incorporating support for Android apps was always on Jolla’s roadmap but today it’s confirmed that Android apps can now run directly on Sailfish without any modifications — crossing off a key requirement as it tries to establish its platform ahead of launching its own hardware starting in Q4.

Jolla has also confirmed Sailfish is now compatible with Android hardware –  noting specifically it’s able “to run on common hardware produced for Android, particularly smartphones and tablets”.

On the hardware side, the startup is likely hoping to encourage Chinese OEMs, which are already churning out Android devices by the truck-load, to add a Sailfish line to their range with minimal effort required in terms of tweaking the hardware to run another OS. Piggybacking on Android OEMs is a neat way to lower the barrier to entry for Sailfish device-makers.

Vendors interested to utilize Sailfish OS are now able to develop phones and tablets based on many different chipset and hardware configurations. This new level of compatibility will enable device vendors who use Sailfish OS to fully utilize the existing Android hardware ecosystem.

On the software side, trying to get consumers’ attention in an industry so dominated by Google and Apple is a very big ask — see Microsoft’s Windows Phone, for example — which explains Jolla’s thinking in building in Android app support. It wants developers to build native Sailfish apps too but supporting Android apps means users of its hardware don’t have to wait around to get flagship pieces of software.

Jolla’s CEO Tomi Pienimäki specifically flagged up Instagram, WhatsApp, Spotify and Chinese messaging app WeChat in a statement as “popular apps” that will run on Sailfish from the get-go. By contrast, Windows Phone is still waiting for Instagram to be ported over.

Sailfish OS users “will be able to take full advantage of the Android application ecosystem available through various app stores globally”, Jolla said today, adding: “Jolla will co-operate with leading global app stores to ensure users can seamlessly download Android apps just as they would do on any Android device.”

Also today, the startup said it plans to kick off another pre-sales campaign for its forthcoming smartphone — the €399 handset with the customisable rear, revealed back in May – after closing out its initial pre-order run last month, with up to 50,000 units booked. 

It appears that Jolla — which is largely comprised of ex-Nokians, who worked on the MeeGo-based N9 prior to Nokia’s switch to Windows Phone — is hoping to capitalise on anti-Microsoft sentiment in Finland, following the news (earlier this month) that Nokia will be exiting the mobile-making business by selling its devices & services unit to Microsoft.

“After the Microsoft-Nokia announcement the strategic position of Jolla and Sailfish OS has strengthened significantly,” Jolla notes in a press release today.

With a new pre-sales campaign for Jolla-made hardware, Finns looking to express displeasure at the fate of the once mighty mobile maker being brought low by, at least in part, tying its fortunes to Microsoft’s OS will have the chance to buy into an alternative homegrown handset — one not running a made-in-Redmond OS.

“Due to extremely positive feedback and increased demand in the past weeks, we are offering another pre-order opportunity for our second production batch later this week through jolla.com. This will be targeted to Finnish customers who want to express their passion for the Finnish mobile industry,” Pienimäki added in a statement.

The rumors were on the mark — as part of a larger telecom plan, the European Commission’s Neelie Kroes has proposed regulation that would largely scrap roaming fees. The measure would ban all charges for incoming calls within the EU after July 1st next year, and give carriers incentives to drop many other roaming fees altogether. Companies would either have to let customers use “roam like at home” plans in EU countries or offer a choice of roaming providers with cheap rates. Outbound, mobile-to-mobile calls within member states would cost no more than €0.19 per minute.

The strategy also includes rules for enforcing net neutrality across the EU. The proposal bans internet providers from blocking and throttling content. Firms could offer priority services like IPTV only as long as these features don’t slow down other subscribers, who could walk away from contracts if they don’t get their advertised speeds. There’s no guarantee that the European Parliament will vote in favor of the new measures, but it’s already clear that the Commission is far from happy with the telecom status quo.

[Image credit: The Council of the European Union]

Filed under: Cellphones, Networking, Internet, Mobile

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Via: Dominic Laurie (Twitter)

Source: European Union

Nokia has been rumoured to be preparing a Windows Phone-powered phablet for many months, to expand the upper echelons of its smartphone portfolio and battle Samsung’s Galaxy Note line (the latest of which, the Note 3, was unboxed only this week). Images purporting to depict a palm-stretching handset carrying Nokia’s branding have also cropped up online before now, but today prolific leaker @evleaks has posted a press image in Nokia’s typical style.

The image shows what’s evidently a larger than usual Windows Phone, with enough screen real estate to display 11 x 6 rows of icons (vs the 7 x 4 icons that the 4.5 inch Lumia 925 accommodates). The other notable feature is the gently protruding rear camera which looks to be the same as the 925′s PureView-branded 8.7MP lens — so not, in other words, the 41MP ‘true PureView’ Lumia 1020.

Nokia hasn’t officially confirmed its phablet launch plans, but the pattern of an increasing flow of leaks is consistent with other leaky Lumia launch trajectories (such as the Lumia 1020). It’s certainly no secret that Nokia has been weighing up getting into the phablet space on Windows Phone — and doing so for a long time. Back in February 2012 the company told TechCrunch that it was “looking closely [at the mid-size tablet market] and looking to see whether it will catch on”.

In the event, Samsung has continued building momentum in the category, while smartphone screens generally have inflated in size to try to keep up with the trend for bigger phones.  Meanwhile Nokia has faced an uphill battle trying to sell its smartphones in a market dominated by Android and iOS. Indeed, it’s been such a struggle for the company that, at the start of this week, it confirmed it would be throwing in the towel by selling its Devices & Services unit to Microsoft for $7.2 billion and licensing its brand name for use by Redmond on mobiles and smartphones.

That transaction is not due to close til the first quarter of 2014, though, so Nokia has a few more months of pushing phones ahead of it. The Windows Phone phablet is named in @evleaks’ tweet as the Nokia Lumia 1520 and includes this year’s date — indicating a 2013 launch, which suggests Nokia will be launching the device, rather than letting Microsoft do the honours.

Getting into the phablet making-game — even at this late stage — is one way for Nokia to try to make its devices stand out against the iPhone, which has remained sub-phablet sized, despite Apple increasing the screen size of its current flagship iPhone 5 to 4 inches (up from 3.5 inches). But it’s not going to help Lumia stand out against Android, as many Android OEMs have been ploughing the big phone furrow for some time. As well as the Galaxy Note line (and Samsung’s other phablet brand, Mega), a Nokia phablet would compete with phablets from the likes of Sony, LG and Huawei.

Add to that, Apple continues to be rumoured to be testing bigger screen iPhones – albeit, testing different form factors is simply due diligence in such a competitive market as smartphones. It remains to be seen whether a phablet-sized iPhone will end up going into production — a Reuters report has previously suggested Apple is considering a 2014 timeframe for that. Meanwhile Cupertino of course has its iPad mini and full fat iPad to cover off the larger form factor tablet space in its portfolio (Nokia is rumoured to be lining up a Windows RT tablet too — doubtless on its soon-to-be-phone-owner Microsoft’s instructions).

Returning to the Lumia phablet, at the end of the day, a larger screen is not what Windows Phone needs to lure consumers away from Android and iOS. It needs more developers to make better apps — but with Android dominating market share and iOS still leading on app monetisation there’s precious little reason for developers to prioritise Microsoft’s OS.

And, from the consumer perspective, Windows Phone remains a solution looking for a problem. Android and iOS continue to be successful because of their apps focus and app-centric UIs. Just offering something different is not in itself enough of a reason for choice-spoilt consumers to care at this point — as the failure of Facebook’s Android launcher/app replacer, Home, also underlines.

Denmark’s The Eye Tribe is not an indigenous group that worships the ocular organ, but a startup that works in machine vision, specifically developing eye tracking tech for use in consumer electronics. In service of its goal of delivering gaze controlled games and software applications to users on a broad scale, The Eye Tribe today unveiled a $99 USB 3.0 hardware accessory for Windows devices, which provides eye tracking capabilities to any tablet, laptop or PC running Microsoft’s desktop OS.

The Eye Tribe Tracker, as it’s called, is aimed at developers, and ships with an SDK to help devs build eye tracking and control functionality into their existing software. Just a few lines of code are required, The Eye Tribe claims, resulting in a real-time feed on “on-screen gaze coordinates” which a software developer can use as an input mechanism or to collect data.

This initial batch of pre-orders is targeted specifically at developers, The Eye Tribe co-founder and CEO Sune Alstrup Johansen tells me, but the eventual goal is to ship to consumers, something Johansen says the company would “preferably” accomplish “together with an OEM.”

“We are determined to provide eye tracking for everyone,” he explained. “Finding a strong hardware partner that will bring this to market with us is the optimal way for us. However, we can and will do it ourselves, if we do not find the right partner in proper time.”

As for the current price point, which seems quite low at under $100 for The Eye Tribe’s advanced tech, Johansen wouldn’t say exactly whether the startup was making money or taking a loss on these dev units, but did say they expect pricing of Eye Tribe hardware to go down, and the cost of the tech itself being largely invisible to general users.

“We wanted this to be available for every developer out there, and our software can work with affordable components,” he said. “In the future prices will go down, as volume goes up. We want to earn money on licensing, not on hardware sales. We see this being integrated into tables, smartphones and laptop without any visible price changes for the consumers.”

Samsung and others are building similar tech into mobile devices, and other startups like Israel’s Umoove are anticipating demand from OEMs. Still, it’s hardly a crowded space just yet. If The Eye Tribe can get a jump on the market by seeding low-cost developer hardware, then it should stand a chance of becoming a go-to supplier, when and if eye tracking becomes a standard device feature.

Amidst the “sadness” of today’s news that Nokia would be splitting up, selling its Devices & Services division to Microsoft for $7.2 billion, there is a little silver lining for the Nokia fanboys in the house. As part of the €1.65 billion ($2.2 billion) licensing deal (which also includes “reciprocal rights related to HERE services”), Nokia gives details of how Microsoft will license Nokia’s brand. The description indirectly indicates that Nokia may still end up making hardware sooner rather than later, and it may even go so far as to start producing mobile devices again in 30 months, by January 2016.

The note (emphasis mine):

“Microsoft has agreed to a 10 year license arrangement with Nokia to use the Nokia brand on current Mobile Phones products,” the note reads. ‘Mobile Phones’ is Nokia’s term for its non-smartphone devices, which it calls ‘Smart Devices.’ Nokia continues: “Nokia will continue to own and maintain the Nokia brand. Under the terms of the transaction, Microsoft has agreed to a 10-year license arrangement with Nokia to use the Nokia brand on current and subsequently developed products based on the Series 30 and Series 40 operating systems. Upon the closing of the transaction, Nokia would be restricted from licensing the Nokia brand for use in connection with mobile device sales for 30 months and from using the Nokia brand on Nokia’s own mobile devices until December 31, 2015.

What we have here is some license to use the Nokia brand for the next 10 years, but also a gradual phasing out of it: Microsoft, it has been noted, is buying outright the Lumia and Asha brands. But when it comes to the Nokia name, it has signed a license to use it only on lower end devices built on Series 30 and Series 40 operating systems. (Asha is based on Series 40, so it’s not clear whether those will fall into this category.) That effectively makes it sound like the Nokia brand will not be attached to new smartphones and higher-end feature phones produced by Microsoft. As for how “Nokia” may get used in those S30 and S40 mobile phones, that’s not specified: it could be on the devices, but it could just be in how the phones are marketed.

On the other side of the bargaining table, we have an interesting loophole for Nokia here. First of all, Nokia has, elsewhere in the company, a business left in which it will be licensing patents. You can see where it might use that channel to license its brand as well — right away if the device is not a mobile device, and in 30 months if it is for a mobile device. (Eau de Nokia aftershave, anyone?)

More interestingly, there is no restriction on Nokia itself using the name on non-mobile devices of its own from the day after the deal comes into effect. And after December 31, 2015, Nokia will be free to make its own mobile devices once again, under its name, if it so chooses.

There is a lot still left at Nokia that can make its way into a mobile device or a gadget of another sort. Through all of Nokia’s thousands of layoffs, closure of Symbian and adoption of Windows Phone, the company has kept plugging away at new technologies and thoughts about how it might apply them, and in an optimistic frame of mind, this could point to some exciting things:

“There will be all kinds of devices over time, and it might not be what you think of as handsets today,” noted David Wood, the co-founder of Symbian who is no longer with the company. “Who knows what will be interesting in the longer timescale? With innovations around wearable computing like Glass from Google, Nokia may want to get into some of this eventually.”

“Our current CTO organization has research on-going in a number of areas, not all of which are public, but which could give opportunities for new Nokia or partner products which would not conflict with this. We’re now beginning the detailed strategic planning for the new Advanced Technologies business, built on many of the activities from our current CTO and IPR organizations and expect to share more of our detailed strategy by the closing of the transaction,” a spokesperson tells me.

Of that CTO office, recent Nokia alum Wood describes the team as “very bright people who have now learned their lessons about how a company that was once cutting edge can fall into being risk averse.”

He points to innovations with touchscreens, augmented reality and more that languished in the labs for fear of cannibalizing a then-successful business. Natasha notes that some of the areas that Nokia has been exploring in its Advanced Technologies division include research into the carbon-based graphene, nano technology and flexible displays — and that’s only the stuff that’s been made public. In other words we may well see devices, and mobile devices, come from Nokia, but not as we know them today.

That’s right, old Nokia may go back to its innovative, disruptive roots. Considering its current smartphone share is only 3%, it’s a brand really with nothing to lose.

The disparity between a 10-year license and the 30-month mobile device restriction raises questions, too. Assuming that Microsoft doesn’t necessarily want to create confusion in the market, it’s curious that they would sign a long-term deal for the rights to a name, but then basically let Nokia use the name however it wants after 30 months. Perhaps it doesn’t have the intention of holding on to that license (as in, it may sell it on) for 30 months, either because it will discontinue that business, or because it will be looking for a buyer for those assets — one way that it might make $600 million in cost synergies through the deal.

And what happens to all of the above if the deal falls through, failing to pass regulatory or shareholder approval? Business as before, it seems, with an additional break fee for Nokia: “The transaction is subject to potential purchase price adjustments, protecting both Nokia and Microsoft, and a $750 million termination fee payable by Microsoft to Nokia in the event that the transaction fails to receive necessary regulatory clearances.”

Image: 30th birthday card, Cardstore