As I started gathering people’s attention to start our first monthly meeting of 2015 last week, I realized that this was the third year anniversary of the Jolla Iteration process. Although we were founded a bit earlier in autumn of 2011, it was January of 2012 when we hired the first sailors, kicked off the monthly company planning and execution with the very first iteration meeting, and started our long journey together – and we have now only just begun!
Now we’re really excited to start sharing our monthly planning goals, activities, feelings etc. here on the Jolla blog! Even though we’re quite a small team here, there’s so many activities going on that we’re not going to cover them all. So what we’re doing here is offering you some highlights for the past & coming months, and also aiming to show what our priorities are currently, what we think has been satisfying, funny, or if we were disappointed about something.
Sailfish OS development
The starting point in our Sailfish OS development is, that during 2015 we will see Sailfish OS evolve into a scalable mobile operating system capable of running on a range of devices with different form factors. It will also bring a renewed Sailfish OS user interface (UI). We plan to demo this evolution at Mobile World Congress in March 2015. We have now started to work full speed on the new UI framework changes and are currently in the prototyping phase. Our main driver is to introduce changes that:
1) enhance user experience on the phone and tablet; 2) strengthen the platform (OS) core; and 3) simplify implementation for a better managed code base.
Important areas we work on now include system update improvements, adaptation work for the tablet, and further performance improvements, to mention a few. During this month, we’re also working on the following new features:
- Private browsing
- Lock screen media player controls
- Enable USB tethering in the UI
- IMAP idle/push support
- And as always, bug fixing is part of our daily work and will carry on in parallel with all of the above activities!
Read more details about the Sailfish OS roadmap and the development iteration here.
Events: MWC 2015 and FOSDEM!
This month on the business and marketing side of things we’re working hard on preparing our presence at the biggest mobile industry event Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2015 . A dedicated Jolla team, with people from different functions, are traveling to (hopefully warm) Barcelona, to show some Jolla love and passion to the MWC crowd! This month we’re working on the general messaging, the whole fair set-up, talking to partners, and planning all the activities on location. We’re also planning to do some community activity there, and we’ll inform more on this when the plans get clearer.
Next week taking part in the open source developer event FOSDEM 2015 in Brussels. There will be a Sailfish OS related session hosted by David Greaves. If you’re attending the event, please join us at the community events as well.
Factory visit in December
As you know, we’re currently working rigorously on all aspects of the Jolla Tablet, and during the last iteration of 2014 our Jolla team paid a visit to the production facility in Asia. During the very productive visit, our team and our partner went through all aspects to the production, schedules, design details, certification matters, just to mention a few agenda items. People at the factory were very excited to work with us and to help in making the world first Sailfish OS tablet! All in all, we’re now very confident with how things look on this side. A lot of work remains to be done, but we are looking forward to delivering the tablet to all of you soon.
VIP box shipping!
Just last week we announced the availability of two new The Other Half covers Lime and Nadeshiko Pink. As launch sales effort we decided to offer them as a nice bundle package, and as a special item we gave 50 first orders a cool handmade VIP box including an extra Aloe cover. Our sailors responsible for online sales and logistics went to the DHL warehouse and prepared the VIP packages by hand for the lucky receivers. Congrats to you early movers who got the VIP package!
As with our tradition, at the end of our iteration day we stood on our feet and had a 1-2-3-SHOUT! And then a hug of our fellow sailors before closing the day and getting ready for the next. This time, it was 1-2-3-YEARS-OF-JOLLA!
Thank you for sharing this thoughts with us.
Really enjoyed this blog entry 🙂 love to see such a great progress is being made. Keep up the great work.
It keeps amazing me how such a small company can achieve so much in such a short time. Preparing for MWC must be a huge effort on its own – then there’s FOSDEM, the daily business of developing Sailfish even further, someone must keep an eye or two on the tablet… I wonder if there’s somebody who adds any magic substances to your coffee at work. 🙂
(Whats the Finnish name of Getafix? Akvavitix?)
I will post a photo of the coffee machine tomorrow to prove that no additional substances (other than milk) are added 😉
Good job guys 🙂
😆 I take your word. 😉
(And a part of me wouldn’t be surprised to see a high-end espresso machine with a small touch-screen that clearly uses Silica components in the UI… after all, it’s a “scalable mobile operating system capable of running on a range of devices with different form factors” 😆 )
Great read.
Looking forward to all the nice Sailor things happening this year.
Very cool sneak peek inside your organisation. As already said by others, it is truly impressive how much such a small company is able to achieve in such a short timespan. Impressively well, on top of that.
BUT WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY DO I NEVER GET CHOSEN WHEN THERE ARE THOSE RANDOM VIP BONUSES??????? WHAT IS THE OFFENCE AM I GUILTY OF THAT WOULD EXPLAIN I’M NEVER ONE OF THE LUCKY BASTARDS TO WIN AT ANY SWEEPSTAKE?????? (apart from overuse of various punctuation signs…) WHAT IS THY CURSE THROWNEDTH UPON ME, MY LORD???
Why? 😐
Guys (and Girls),
I’m impressed by what you’ve achieved so far being a so small company. And I love my Jolla, really.
But please, do NOT forget you’ve done a phone. USB tethering and private browsing are interesting feature, no doubt.
But again, it’s a phone, and not having voicemail notification is really bad. The patch do exist to implement such feature, and it works. I shouldn’t be too much difficult to add it in your roadmap.
Thanks.
Hello
Is outlook.com e-mail, calendar and contacts sync expected to arrive sometime in Sailfish OS?
Thanks
I would like to see that. I am using android app at the moment but would really prefer to use a native email client.
Hi Pootis and Mariusmssj,
You can create your Microsoft exchange account from Settings > Accounts. After that you can choose to sync your Calendar, contacts and email to corresponding native (Sailfish OS) applications. Syncing might take a few minutes!