Jolla: A New Smartphone Startup In A Crowded Market

Made up of former Nokia employees, Jolla was a product of Nokia’s “Bridge” – the project to relocate employees whose roles at Nokia were eliminated by the decision to move away from MeeGo and from Symbian as a smartphone OS. Nokia has even opened up a number of patents to assist Jolla’s development of a recognizably Nokia-heritaged fork to the long-running mobile Linux project.

(UPDATE: It turns out that the Finnish source of this information may have assumed too much: Nokia has clarified that they were not transferring patents to this or any other Bridge beneficiaries. They may be licensing them, but are not commenting on that. So, it seems like that Jolla MeeGo will build largely on “stock” MeeGo. How much this will impact the user experience is at this point an open question – a lot would depend on the UI experience, which was always going to be Jolla’s own creation.)

Jolla Mobile to announce first MeeGo phone this year

Jolla Mobile, the company that was founded by Nokia's former MeeGo strike-force, has been somewhat open to the media these days, revealing some interesting bits of info regarding its eventual upcoming devices.

In an interview with Tech Crunch, Jolla's CEO, Jussi Hurmola, has talked about the company's plans to bring not one, but two MeeGo smartphones to the market next year. One of those smartphones would be targeted to the mass-market, general consumer, while the other will be designed with devs and hackers in mind. That really seems like an ambitious effort, considering that Jolla currently has no more than 50 employees, although they do claim they are hiring "aggressively".

Ex-Nokia guys start mystery company to build Linux-based phones

A six-man group of open-source diehards from Nokia have teamed up to form Jolla Mobile, a company focused on building phones using the Linux-based MeeGo operating system.

Rather, MeeGo will be a sort of jumping-off point. On its Twitter page, Jolla advisor and former MeeGo product manager Jukka Eklund wrote, “We are developing [our] own smartphone OS based on ‪MeeGo… our own UI… for new products.”

Jolla will soon be making announcements about its version of MeeGo as well as a brand new smartphone it’s bringing to market.

The company so far is composed of “N9 core professionals and MeeGo community alumni,” the page reads. While N9 folks will be at the helm, there is no intention to offer support for Nokia’s N9 smartphones — more on those later.