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.