Jolla will focus on launching these devices in China

Nov 21, 2012 13:01 GMT  ·  By

Jolla’s Sailfish mobile operating system has been made official today at the Finnish Slush conference, yet it won’t arrive on shelves until next year.

The company has confirmed that the first devices powered by the new Sailfish OS would be launched in 2013, and it also unveiled that it would focus on making them available in China, the country with the largest mobile user base in the world.

No other details on these smartphones have been provided as of now, though Jolla did confirm that they would pack ST­Ericsson’s NovaThor platform inside (though the platform comes with support for other chipset technologies as well).

“We warmly welcome ST­Ericsson onboard. It is great that this industry leader is partnering with us and Sailfish. ST­Ericsson’s NovaThor platform combined with Sailfish OS will enable vendors to bring highly competitive mobile products to the market,” Marc Dillon, CEO Of Jolla, said.

“We welcome other players in the mobile industry to join and contribute to this game changing movement. We also target to announce other chipset provider partnerships soon.”

At the Sailfish OS launch event, Jolla also demoed the user interface the new platform will arrive on shelves with, stressing on the ease-of-use it has to offer, as well as on the multi-tasking capabilities it was developed with.

Jolla also presented a video demo of the new UI, which we included in our previous post on the Sailfish OS, but which did not offer as many details as some might have wanted regarding the use on an actual device.

However, it seems that the company also demoed the platform on a Nokia N950 smartphone to MTV 3 Finland, and that the video has already emerged online. You can have a look at it below.

The UI shows running applications in the form of cards, though users can easily interact with them even without having to launch the apps themselves.

Moreover, the application drawer can be found beneath the homescreen, accessible through swiping up anywhere on the homescreen. There is also a Pulley Menu that offers fast interaction with information and personalization.

One other important thing that has to be said about the platform is the fact that it will also offer support for Android applications. Many of them will work unchanged, though they will need to be ported to take advantage of the OS and its features.

Jolla has already promised a mobile OS unlike other, and it seems that Sailfish might indeed arrive on devices as advertised, although we’ll still have to wait a while before being able to learn that firsthand.