Jolla’s MeeGo based phone with new UI coming this year

Joni and Jiipee from Finland have some interesting news on Jolla, the future direction of Maemo/MeeGo outside of Nokia, from Finnish media. I can’t wait to see Jolla Mobile’s products.  This feels much more of a truer direction, what with actual use of MeeGo and ex Nokia staff on board, as opposed to Tizen which has as much MeeGo spirit in it as my bagel.

Joni got this from today’s Aamulehti which is apparently not online.

• – at the moment near 50 employees. At end of this year 100 employees.
• – offices in Helsinki and Tampere
• – manufacturing: 3 big international partners and finnish subcontractors too.
• – first products this year
• – aims at the ‘big game’. It is difficult to be a small company in telecom industry.
• – Jolla-phone: user uses the device and not vice versa. They’ll be making their own UI
• – CEO Jussi Hurmola worked 12 years at Nokia. Last years with N9
• – Hurmola’s interpretation: Nokia has taken Jolla-project nicely
• – He thanks Nokia for being serious and sincere ( or frank) regarding the project.

Cross referencing with Jiipee’s info from TV4

• – They were suprised on the amount of interest
• – They have approx 50 employees at the moment: engineers, devs, designers, marketing professionals, more than 50% are former Nokians. All dedicated to open source development
• – Nokia knows what they are doing – they have been very open on it! (could this mean no IP wars to be expected). He has been working for Nokia for 12 years and says that Nokia is superb company (clearly no hard feelings)
• – They had other alternatives such as Android, but chose Meego because they can be on the drivers seat. With Meego they will be able to integrate different parts to a full UX instead of separate apps
• – the phone will be released this year

Watch here: http://ismobilea.thirdpresence.com/dls/t/watch.jsp?org=1&iid=724698

Cheers Joni and Jiipee for the tip!

Category: Jolla, Nokia