Today the calendar flipped over to November 21, and as promised, Jolla has shown off its MeeGo-based Sailfish OS. The company says that Sailfish is "designed with the most recent consumer needs in mind," with a focus on quick multitasking and the ability to interact with running applications from the home screen without actually entering the app. Sailfish also includes a new "Pulley Menu" that lets users see a menu and select different options by sliding up and down on the display, personalization features and the ability to quickly peek at status updates.
Jolla has posted a video of Sailfish running on some actual hardware. The lockscreen shows notifications on the right side, and a menu is pulled down from the top of the screen. After sliding up from the bottom of the screen to unlock the device, users are presented with small windows of their running apps that can be interacted with as well as a dock with four app icons. Once inside an app, users can slowly slide a finger from right to left for a quick peek at the home screen or completely slide the finger across to return home. Sliding up from the home screen presents users with their list of installed apps.
Along with all of these Sailfish demos, Jolla has announced that chipset-maker ST-Ericsson will support Sailfish with its NovaThor platform. The company expects to announce more chipset partnerships soon. When it comes to actual devices, Sailfish-powered hardware is due to arrive next year. So far there have been no U.S.-specific announcements. Looking at Sailfish in Jolla's demo videos, the OS seems to have some elements that are reminiscent of other mobile platforms, like BlackBerry 10's Active Frames and a focus on gestures like Nokia's Harmattan flavor of MeeGo. It'll definitely be interesting to see what kind of hardware Jolla is cooking up to run Sailfish, but for now we'll have to settle for these brief videos of the OS itself. What do you all make of Sailfish so far? Does it look like something you'd consider using?
Sailfish advances - Sailfish OS, with SDK and UI introduced
Helsinki, Finland - Today at the Slush start-up event Jolla and Sailfish take significant steps forward and bring Sailfish Software DevelopmentKit (SDK) for the community and showcases it effortless and innovative User Interface (UI) for the first time.
Sailfish OS already supports multiple chipset technologies that are being demonstrated today in Slush, and further support is continuously being built for all the major chipsets. Today Jolla is happy to announce that ST-Ericsson is ready to support Sailfish OS in its NovaThor platforms.
“We are pleased to add Sailfish OS to the mobile operating systems supported on our NovaThor ModAp platforms. Supporting Sailfish from its inception shows how flexibly ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor platforms can adapt to different mobile OS’es and we look forward to seeing Sailfish powered devices in the market next year,” said Peter Oaklander, Senior Vice President for Sales & Marketing ST-Ericsson.
“We warmly welcome ST-Ericsson onboard. It is great that this industry leader is partnering with us and Sailfish. ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor platform combined with Sailfish OS will enable vendors to bring highly competitive mobile products to the market. 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,” said Marc Dillon, CEO of Jolla.
Sailfish Alliance is first and foremost a movement that will unite OEM and ODM manufacturers, chipset providers, operators, application developers and retailers.
The key target is to bring innovation to a stagnating market and help mobile industry players to stay on the bleeding edge of the mobile OS development.
Sailfish SDK preview introduced to facilitate community work and application development
The Sailfish OS and UI are highly adaptable and will support smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, automotive and other device classes.
Sailfish is a real opportunity for developers to participate in and build solutions with existing open source projects such as Qt, Mer Core, and the Linux kernel. The new OS will be built through community involvement and participation.
The Sailfish SDK consists of Mer Core’s tools, Qt Creator, Jolla UI components, Sailfish UI framework and Sailfish handset application interfaces. The SDK encourages Sailfish friends to extend the tools to support development for their company’s style. The SDK is the right choice for Sailfish Alliance partners for both contributing to the direction of the operating system and developing new and magical products. The SDK is available and developed at www.sailfishos.org.
Fastest Use
The Sailfish user interface, shown for the first time at Slush, has been designed with the most recent consumer needs in mind. With the most modern mobile UI Sailfish provides effortless multitasking. Users are able to multitask instantly between truly running applications. Even more, users are able to interact with the running applications directly on the home view: ending a call, pausing a song - without needing to enter the application. This multitasking feature brings usability and speed-of-use to a totally new level, unseen in the mobile industry.
The UI also features many new innovations, such as the Pulley Menu enabling fast and effortless interaction, at-a-glance peeks at status information, and effortless personalization of the device to match the user’s style and mood.
For the UI demo, please visit youtube.com/user/jollaofficial.
For media contact: press@jollamobile.com
About Jolla
Jolla Ltd., headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, is developing mobile devices and open Sailfish OS based on MeeGo and Mer Core open source projects. In addition to its R&D sites in Helsinki and Tampere, Jolla has offices in Hong Kong and is establishing R&D operations in China mainland in order to lead the Sailfish alliance development and ecosystem. Jolla strongly believes and understands that the community is the heart of the idea generation, technology development and distribution and is committed to supporting community involvement and participation within Sailfish.
