Hasta La Gadget!

MeeGo got a reprise last week, when Finnish start-up Jolla Mobile announced it would be using the open-source OS for a smartphone push of its own, and now the company has been talking more about Nokia, app strategy and working in the shadow of the N9. CEO Jussi Hurmola sat down with The Voicemail, confirming that Jolla’s public reveal had been prompted in part by excitement around the MeeGo PR1.3 update to the N9 last week, but that Nokia had known for some time that its abandoned OS was about to be resurrected.

“Last week there was lots of news concerning MeeGo, there was the 1.3 Nokia update, and people were speculating “is this the end of the story, the end of the line, will there be any hope any more?” What we basically wanted to say is that MeeGo is not dead” Hurmola told The Voicemail’s Stefan Constantine. “We got such a tremendous response from Twitter and the online community, and then even the traditional media, that we had no choice but to go with it.”

Nokia, meanwhile, had first heard about Jolla as part of the Bridge program, which the company set up to help employees made redundant find new roles or establish start-ups. ”Within the [Bridge] program we had an opportunity to be open with Nokia with what we were doing,” Hurmola explained, “so it’s not a surprise for them, and their response to our stuff is not a surprise to us. We were able to cooperate in setting up this thing.” In fact, around 50-percent of the current Jolla workforce has come from Nokia, and “almost everybody” has Maemo, Moblin or MeeGo backgrounds.

However, that cooperation doesn’t mean the Jolla phones will get the UI from the N9. ”Swipe is a Nokia device UI. We’re going to do a new UI, and selecting MeeGo enables us to do something new” Hurmola says. “If we selected Android or something else we would be just following the UI it already has, so we will make a new UI. Of course we will inherit the familiar and powerful elements that MeeGo has as we know it now, but we are not going to use the Nokia way, we will go our own way … It’s inspired by many things. iOS, Android, N9… I personally like the N9, so I’m influenced by this so I think we are influenced by N9 UI in our design.”

That software will run on hardware that’s still in preparation, with Hurmola coy on naming any specific partners. The team has been visiting Chinese companies weekly for the past few months, exploring how it will spend its €10m first round of funding. ”In order to make a smartphone or mobile product these days you need chipset support and ODM support, and some other companies” he says. “We’re already close in negotiations to be able to communicate what partners we actually use.”

“We don’t want to promise anything we cannot do”

The phone itself will be revealed later this year, though is expected to be the first of several devices, equally shrouded in mystery. “Our principle is to be careful, we don’t want to promise anything we cannot do … We have different things on our drawing table at the moment, but we need to see how this first one goes before we commit to future products.”

Why MeeGo and not Android? Jolla’s primary goal is to differentiate in an increasingly crowded marketplace, Hurmola says, and joining in with big-name Android OEMs like Samsung and Motorola – not to mention Google itself with its Nexus series – isn’t the best way to do that. Even with a heavily re-skinned interface, it’s not ideal, he claims.

“There are many people who do UIs on top of Android. It’s still a following game … based mostly on price competition. We want to lead the technology, we want to lead the UI. That’s our business.” Jolla is realistic about the importance of apps, too, though Hurmola refuses to be drawn on the current paucity of third-party MeeGo software. ”I understand that you cannot seriously sell a smartphone if you don’t have sufficient application offering” he said. “I think we will answer those questions, but we will answer them when we publish our product.”

As for whether Jolla Mobile hopes to recreate the success that – until recently – Nokia has had, Hurmola is realistic. “The team that we have, we have built ecosystems, we have built platforms, we have built devices. Building a company you can never repeat, it’s always a different story.” Jolla wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to working with Nokia again in the future he says, however, if the Windows Phone strategy stumbles.

“Creating an ecosystem is about co-operating, it’s not about going alone. What we are doing is collecting partners, collecting effort about MeeGo and Jolla. I’m open to all co-operation. There are different forms of co-operation of course, but the key is to grow the ecosystem.”

Jolla Mobile CEO: “MeeGo is not dead” is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It was almost a year ago in July that I jumped off the Tube at Oxford Circus in London’s West End and wended my way deep into Soho to Nokia’s chi-chi central London office. There, I sat down with a handful of other journalists to interact via live video conference with Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s legendary design guru, about their new smartphone. By this time we’d already had the Burning Platform strategy unveiled by new CEO Stephen Elop. But Ahtisaari unveiled a beautiful, MeeGo-powered smartphone, the N9, and assured the hacks that Nokia was committed to it. It even had Angry Birds! But, with Nokia in bed with Microsoft, we all knew that this would probably be the only MeeGo phone Nokia would produce.

Last week Nokia released a major software upgrade for the N9, but it’s probably the last upgrade we’ll see. Even then, few people even saw a MeeGo-powered N9, basically the shell of what became the Lumia 800 and 900 devices. So what of the poor neglected MeeGo, the platform that barely existed?

Well, Jolla Mobile – a company without even a website yet – hopes to be its resurrection. In the last couple of days it’s emerged that much of the team inside Nokia’s MeeGo’s development has left to created actual new smartphones based for the platform. A spokesperson has categorically denied to TechCrunch that olla Mobile will get any Intellectual Property Rights from Nokia to achieve this, but, according to the CEO, we will see two – count ‘em – two MeeGo phones appear this year. They are even thinking about entirely new products based on MeeGo.

I managed to rack down CEO and co-founder Jussi Hurmola. Hurmola is someone who, to coin a phrase, knows his MeeGo onions.

“We started at the end of last year looking at MeeGo and the ecosystem around it, and we just knew there could be something we could do,” he told me today via a phone interview. “We started going round talking to partners and some of the ‘heavyweights’ in the business. We understood quickly that you would need to be big to survive, and that offering only a small part of the ecosystem would be difficult.”

Perhaps that’s why Jolla’s play is ambitious. It plans to build two smartphones in the next year – pretty big stuff for a startup.

As Hurmola says: “We are will be making smartphones and in order to do this we’ll need an ecosystem and a platform around us. We are going for a pretty big strategy. This is our mission.”

Big mission indeed. Hurmola believes Jolla Mobile could be so influential that it could in fact allow the MeeGo ecosystems to “come back” – because, he argues, it never went away. Indeed, the MeeGo’s heritage contains within it the original vision of creating a truly open source smartphone platform – not the faux open source that Android represents.

And if anyone can do it Jolla can. Half its team has worked on MeeGo and the other half are hard-core ex-Nokians – the kinds of people who built one of the world most successful mobile companies, at least at one time…

“We’re confident we can do it again” he says. “Jolla alone cannot do this so we are talking to big partners. We’re putting those relationships together. We want to create as big a wave as possible.”

But the question is, with smartphone platforms morphing into tablets, can Jolla service these new categories as well?

“We will look at products like tablets, but the market is changing so fast and the categories are being redefined. Netbooks have already disappeared and the smartphone screens are converging. We will start with a smartphone but in 6 months there could be a category for a new kind of product s that is not just a handheld or a tablet.”

Hurmola says that the actual details of the devices Jolla will make can’t yet be revealed, but they want to address two markets – and that will mean two devices. One will be a ‘mass-market’ smartphone aimed at general users. But the other will be aimed at tech users to, as Hurmola says, “honour the origins of MeeGo, Maemo, Moblin and the others.” Let’s hope it actually makes them some money as well…

MeeGo was created by Nokia in partnership with Intel and Samsung. It was the smartphone platform that might, had it come out, taken on iOS and Android. Can Jolla fulfill that promise?

There are no details on the devices as yet, but Hurmola tells me that although he “can’t say much” right now, the “UI is a major thing and one of the reasons we selected Meego. With Android we can only copy — but with MeeGo we can introduce something brand new to the market.” Sounds intriguing…

Jolla is one of the products of Nokia’s Bridge project and it’s clear Jolla will have an ongoing relationship with Nokia, even it’s pretty informal. As Hurmola says” Helsinki is a pretty small place.”

As the startup’s LinkedIn page says, the Jolla team is formed by directors and professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organisation… “Nokia created something wonderful – the world’s best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued.” Indeed, the COO is Marc Dillon, formerly principal engineer on MeeGo.

Hurmola readily admits he was “the guy shouting about fragmenting the code base” when Nokia lost its way. He had worked on Symbian Maemo and finally MeeGo. He wasn’t going to throw all that away.

It will be intriguing to see what they come up with.

It looks like Nokia has been playing the blindfolded dictionary game again. Well, that’s if the image we see above is correct. It’s purportedly a table containing names of upcoming Windows Phone 8 devices, found by a curious wallpaper designer. The names listed for Nokia include “Fluid,” “Dogphone,” and the previously seen “Phi.” One slightly less superlative name — Nokia P4301 — caught the attention of PhoneArena, who mused that P might be for PureView? An interesting, if not optimistic leap. There are two other items in the table that might pique interest: a Samsung SGH-1687 and a Juggernaught Alpha. There’s little else to get excited about specification-wise, bar different versions of Windows Phone, however. That said, no one as yet has mentioned the elephant in the room — what about that “Virtual” model in the works from Microsoft?

Filed under: Cellphones

List of alleged Windows Phones reveals Nokia Dogphone, Fluid and P4301, working titles we hope originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 07:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MeeGo-rescuing smartphone start-up Jolla Mobile hasn’t just received incubator support from Nokia, the company has revealed, but a chunk of mobile patents from Nokia’s portfolio. The Finnish company from which numerous MeeGo engineers left to set up Jolla reportedly freed up several patents to establish the new firm with, founder Jussi Hurmola told ItViikko; rather than blasting Nokia for axing MeeGo and refocusing on Windows Phone, “I would like to thank Nokia” Hurmola says. [Updated after the cut]

Jolla is one of the products of Nokia’s Bridge project, set up to help employees leaving the company start up new businesses of their own. “Nokia will offer training, funding, and help identify business opportunities and partnerships for those interested in starting a new business or a company on their own,” the company said of the scheme, “which can fuel new growth for impacted communities.”

Exactly which patents Nokia has handed over to Jolla is unspecified, though presumably much of the IP in question was produced by the MeeGo team while working on projects like Nokia’s N9. The two companies have a “good and open relationship” according to Hurmola.

Jolla hasn’t confirmed exactly when the first of its devices are expected to hit shelves, though Hurmola says there could be something to see before 2012 is out. The team has been listening “to very strong signals coming from the market” about consumer tastes in smartphones, and has “considered a serious break” with what would traditionally be classified as a smart-device.

Update: Looks like something got lost in translation. According to a statement given to SlashGear from Nokia’s Mark Durrant, the company has not given Jolla any patents. ”We’re proud of the support from our Bridge program to start-ups founded by former Nokia people,” Durrant told us, “but we have not gifted Nokia patents to any of them, including Jolla.”

[via Stefan Constantine]

Nokia gifts MeeGo patents to Jolla startup [Update: Nokia denies] is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

That Nokia Lumia 900 Batman edition not quite your thing? Looks like the Windows Phone handset’s getting yet another version, this time in an eye-catching pink. The new color joins white, black and cyan, heading exclusively to AT&T this Sunday, July 15th. Need some apps to run on that 1.4Ghz processor? Nokia recommends Groupon, Fruit Ninja and the Instagram-esque Apict, for interested parties.

Filed under: Cellphones

Pink Nokia Lumia 900 headed for AT&T July 15th, demands a Psychedelic Furs ringtone originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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