Jolla on track to ship new phone with Sailfish OS, user-replaceable battery

I had a SailfishOS phone for four years; an Xperia XA2+. The operating system was wonderful, and being able to run Android apps when there was no alternative was a good way of filling in the gaps in the Jolla store.

However, as I've got older I find large phones more and more unwieldy, and I couldn't find a small enough SailfishOS phone to switch to. I'm now running LineageOS on a Jelly Star. The form factor is perfect for me.

Would I return to SailfishOS? Absolutely. But there'd need to be a small phone in the line up for me to migrate to.

Are these non Google non Apple phones viable any more?

Considering you almost can't do banking, and in some places interact with the government, without a locked down phone...

I really wish them success, but I just can't see it anymore. I had the first version and it seems it didn't move much forward from that time. And there were also many screwups, as poisonborz reminded a bit earlier.

Their UI looked novel, but wasn't that great in practice. It wasn't stable (hopefully that changed) and the lack of real apps was killing it before and now even more, as more banks/govs require some "trusted" apps

The absence of eSIM is a deal breaker for me. I need to travel to the US for work and last time I was there I was having a hard time to find a physical SIM for the phone I had then.

Americans/Canadians (and I guess Asians since they won't ship there) don't waste your time reading this, they have a Mediatek SoC and made the choice long ago to not touch these markets. The devices will not carry the band support needed for these markets.

Europeans, I guess good luck, have fun. I followed them in the early days and ran early builds of Sailfish on the N9, had high hopes but have long given up on them.

EDIT: I will say though I'm still impressed by the libhybris project which went on to make it possible to run linux distros on android SoC's, but the guy who did that for Jolla I think is not with the company anymore for some time.

So many years and they can't(or refuse to?) ship to Asia, ridiculous.

I would like it to have also hardware video output.

Then I could become a PC in our pocket.

This is why i keep saying the Jolla management neds a rethink. Its 2026 GraphenOS is in a partnership with Motorola while Jolla is still doing early 2K style kickstarter campaigns.

The market is there , product is loved and ppeople have proved they are willing to take some pain adopting the product.But still the execution to serve that market is shambolic to say the least.

They should have collaborated with GrapheneOS like Motorola instead of starting from scratch with Linux and a proprietary user interface. As it stands, this phone will have worse security than a Pixel with Graphene or the upcoming Motorola phone.

It's not an improvement over common closed source Android varieties either, and will certainly have worse app compatibility than Android. Hardware switches are irrelevant if you can't trust the software.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216037

Jolla / Sailfish is a 13 year old project and through all this time they couldn't make a foothold, or even sustain some small motivated community around them. During this time:

- company folded and changed hand multiple times, including russian ownership

- the tablet scandal leaving users with lost funds

- closed source parts

- locked bootloader

- charging a $50 device reset fee

- not much change in Sailfish OS since ages

- buggy Android compatibility and near zero native devs, all jumped ship

At this point I think they are just one of the grifters preying on naive "EU first" supporters shoveling whatever they still have in a new casing.

I'd love the idea of a greenfield EU Linux mobile OS, but I don't think it should come from this company.

What network connectivity does it have for US?

I used to use a Sony phone with Sailfish but stopped when US shifted to voice over LTE and phones I used were not supported by the networks. If this phone works on US networks, I can't wait to get rid of my Android phone for sailfish. I vibed with Sailfish so hard.