Greetings from Tampere! It’s summer in Finland (we had a total of 3 warm days so far), and the Jolla Sailors are hard at work bringing you the best software and hardware experience on the upcoming Jolla Tablet. In the meantime, we thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at you, our dear readers, many of whom are our tablet contributors!
We sent out the “Jolla Tablet User Experience Questionnaire” in January 2015, and received 4728 responses, which makes up 65% of our Jolla Tablet Indiegogo backers from the first phase. Most of the answers are from Europe, although we also have some from Americas, Asia, as well as Australia!
Who are our Jolla Tablet contributors?
First, some general demographics. The vast majority of the respondents are male, with about 3/4 falling between the 26-49 age groups. Do these come as a surprise to you? 🙂
What are you using?
We’re happy to see that close to half (49%) of the answers indicate that you are a Jolla smartphone owner. We’re equally excited that there will be many of you experiencing a Sailfish OS device for the first time, with the Jolla Tablet!
For those who already own a tablet (67%), almost 2/3 (65%) are running Android. A sample of the tablet models is illustrated below.
In terms of the languages on devices, English is most widely used, followed by German. Personally I thought the number for Finnish will be higher, as 23% of the respondents were from Finland compared to 16% from Germany. Do many Finns use their phones and tablets in English or even Swedish?
Languages used on devices aside from English
By the way, we just completed the translation round for 15 languages, covering majority of your needs!
Why did you contribute?
The motivation behind the “Why” of things is always interesting and important. For this question of “why did you choose to back the Jolla tablet?”, where users can select two responses each, we learnt the following:
To see Sailfish OS and Jolla (the company) as some of the main reasons for your support is really encouraging to us. Thank you!
Some of the other reasons specified include support for open-source, Linux-based, privacy and security.
Apps and accessories
In order to focus our development efforts to better serve you, we asked about the top tablet applications and accessories you are interested in.
The top 5 applications mentioned are: Browser (100%), Facebook (100%), Skype (90%), Twitter (81%), and Email (72%).
This information has helped us immensely in getting to know how you will be using your device, so we can prepare for it adequately (codecs, formats, plus app availability etc.). We are working on ensuring that the top apps perform well, however as we collected over 15k apps from the survey responses, we will prioritise the most popular apps for your enjoyment.
On the accessories front, the top 5 desirables are: Cases, Stylus, Screen protector, Stand, and Keyboard.
With the success of the TOHKBD project, I was expecting more demand for keyboards, but perhaps tablet usage differs quite a bit from phones. Well, this is why we conduct the survey to hear what you have to say!
We were on target with anticipating your needs for a tablet case, as we offered the LastuCase in the first phase of the Indiegogo campaign and the mapbagrag® case in the second. If you missed out on the LastuCase for Jolla Tablet (which doubles as a stand), you can still pre-order it here.
Concluding comments
On behalf of Jolla, I thank you all for your contributions, as well as taking the time to reply to our questionnaire. What do you think of these findings? Are they as you expected? Let us know in the comments! To wrap up, here are some highlights from the open feedback we received in the survey:
“Thanks for creating a mobile environment where the user is in charge. I very much appreciate your open approach and your attitude as a company, especially to be the creating and producing arm of a community.”
“Please keep on going with your commitment to security, freedom and privacy. You are doing a great job! I love the handling of my Jolla Phone and i am looking forward to see Sailfish OS on a tablet.”
Very interesting data, thanks for sharing Carol! The apps people are interested about have also been valuated as native versions by Jolla. You listed:
Browser (100%)
Facebook (100%)
Skype (90%)
Twitter (81%)
Email (72%)
Linked below is a review on how users have found Browser, Messages(handling FB) and Email, apps by Jolla. Additionally Skype works well as an Android app, and for Twitter there’s a great 3rd party app called Tweetian for Sailfish OS.
http://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2015/03/user-reviews-applications-provided-by.html
Hi Simo, we’re aware of the user reviews of apps on your blog, thanks for that! We have been making more improvements to the high priority apps, and we hope the scores have been increasing with each update 🙂
There actually is one app showing progress, and happy to see it’s one of the open sourced. Not sure if IMG-code works here on Jolla Blog, so below is a direct link too just in case:
[IMG]http://i58.tinypic.com/2823n2r.jpg[/IMG]
http://oi58.tinypic.com/2823n2r.jpg
These word clouds don’t help visualizing anything. You say Facebook and Browser got 100%? Why is the font size of the word Facebook smaller? And why is it even smaller than Skype (90%)? And did you really differentiate between E-Mail, Email and Mail? Do the words ‘app’ or ‘client’ any good? Maybe the list should have been sanitized before interpreting it.
The word cloud is more for general visualization and not intended as an accurate representation. I believe the top apps have been checked, but I’ll confirm with the one who prepared these results!
Having thought of the Sailfish community – incl. endusers 😉 – of a privacy-aware bunch of people I honestly got stunned a bit about the overwhelming request for a native Sailfish implementation for Skype 😮 ….
At the time of survey I opted for an implementation of Jitsi instead – imho a very handy & versatile communication app Skype could’ve developed into, but didn’t, due to very obvious reasons).
Jitsi for Android ( alpha ) installs very well on Sailfish but audio / video are not working yet under Sailfish Android support. P2P-encrypted / device-verified chat works like a charm instead.
When purchased by Microsoft I decided to abandon my Skype account because I didn’t felt comfortable about me & my friends evolving into pure MS marketing targets not being granted / respected any privacy at all.
Just fyi:
http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/why-is-microsoft-reading-users-skype-messages/
So when I decided leaving Skype I left a mood message : “… migrating to jitsi …” – so guess what, you would’nt believe your eyes, it just got eliminated by 2hrs later leaving me thinking “Oh MS, you’re so not worth it …”
Jitsi & Sailfish could be a global opportunity both for Jitsi & endusers to make this communicator more widely known & appreciated for !
Thanks for the great comment launchpad! We will certainly take a closer look at Jitsi and how it plays into our security plans 🙂
Would be very interesting indeed ! 😉
I posted a screenshot of Jitsi actually running on the jolla device:
https://twitter.com/ClusterLabHQ/status/619271547031830532
Despite not having the audio/video call options available yet ( due to Android Support ) and not all kinds of emoticons directly available it has worked smooth & stable so far on a daily basis ever since having it installed last summer …
Would be definitely very interesting getting it natively on Sailfish devices 🙂 🙂 🙂 ….
I don’t personally think Jitsi itself is necessary, but clients supporting other (non-closed) protocols are important. As long as they have that, they can interoperate with Jitsi users on the desktop.
The built-in client already supports XMPP, but is missing things like OTR. The work for this is mostly done in upstream Telepathy:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16891
For full interop, you’d also need support for audio/video calls and ZRTP. The former already exists in upstream Telepathy, it just doesn’t have support in the UI. (Though I think I remember hearing that that’s changing, at least for audio calls.) ZRTP… would need some work.
I just feel like the messaging client has the potential to be so much greater than it is right now, since the backend already supports many of these features, but it hasn’t received too much attention from what I’ve seen.
According to Carol’s findings, about 95% of Jolla’s tablet survey respondents were male – which might be typical & funny, but rather is alerting to me, as there might be some inherent proliferation hindrances for Jolla’s products incl. the beloved and promising Sailfish platform. I do not mean hindrances towards a higher rate of techie-“fanship”, but hindrances to convince & reach an ordinary and steadily growing customer-base for the Jolla-Sailfish ecosystem which is realized by ordinary shelf customers in the end.
“Hacky” entrance & cultural barriers have to become lowered urgently. Jolla cannot live forever on a Basis of 10000 fan-boys – including proudly myself of course 😉 …
I have acquired 3 jolla phones so far – incl. one for my wife and another one to my sister. Both would’ve never discovered – not even thought of an alternative such as Jolla but got acquainted & convinced after all those little performance tweaks and the setup of the Google Play store in advance of course.
Now you are proposing something very similar to the state of development of the Messaging-Manager running on the good old N900 some 7 years ago – which also handled XMPP P2P w/o encryption, audio or video telephony …. that seems to be convincingly difficult.
In this respect you may appreaciate the advantages of Jitsi’s development work performed meanwhile to create a very up-to-date, privacy-protecting, time-proven and easy-to-use zero-barrier solution. Even key-verification is a walk-over … A promising if not a tempting development level to continue from.
Implementing Jitsi IMHO could deliver a triple-win situation for everyone involved:
Jitsi will raise it’s proliferation and recognition, jolla will gain another security/privacy-supporting argument and end-users will remain in ctrl of their privacy while being offered a low-barrier functional scope comparable to skype …
The availability of daily value of comforting use is very substantial for wider conviction – especially with Messaging.
The issue I have with that is in part a technical one. While a Jitsi port might be interesting from a user experience standpoint…
– It would require a rewrite of the entire UI and maintenance thereafter. I’m fairly confident that Jolla doesn’t have the resources at this time to maintain two separate messaging clients. The Jitsi developers are likely focusing their mobile efforts on Android, considering that Android is both more widely-used and (from a developer’s standpoint) more similar to their existing platform.
– It’s duplicating effort that’s already taken place. The Telepathy framework that’s currently in use on Sailfish already has these features, it’s just a matter of exposing them in the UI.
– It would require a JVM to be running persistently on all Sailfish phones. While this may be excusable on desktops and laptops (which are generally more powerful) or Android phones (which has a Dalvik-based UI and is thus running one anyway), I personally feel that it would be an unwelcome drain of resources.
Furthermore, I’m not convinced that having separate apps is a benefit from a user experience standpoint. One of my favorite things about Sailfish is that all the messaging features I need are baked right into the OS. Instead of “this person is using this platform and this platform, so I need to open this app”… I just open my messenger and everyone is there.
You’re right that I’m thinking of the N900 in that respect – I don’t believe I’ve seen a phone OS since that does as much as the Maemo of old. But it certainly could use a UI update… I see Sailfish as a successor to Maemo, and it’s done a wonderful job. It’s just missing a few things that I used on a daily basis, so I still use my N900 from time to time.
But don’t forget that the biggest barrier for getting people to use XMPP and other open protocols isn’t the messaging app itself: it’s the network effect of the user’s existing network. Whether you’re using Jitsi or Telepathy, you still need to sign up for an XMPP account. You still need to know that user IDs are in the format user@domain.tld, like email addresses. Neither Sailfish’s messenger nor Jitsi configure themselves automatically, which I think is what you really need to increase adoption. It needs to be like iMessage or TextSecure, in that if you’re messaging someone who’s already a user, it seamlessly transitions to messaging through the system. But doing this in a privacy-preserving way is Really Hard:
https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/
I don’t intend to prolong this thread too much any further, thus some final remarks and thanks to “ryukafalz” for his valuable point of view concerning enhanced secure messaging functionality integrated into Sailfish OS :
– I also prefer the comfort of a fully integrated messaging manager à la N900 – but with state-of-the-art security, scope of functionality and UI-ergonomics: secure P2P, management of contact groups, ( conference ) messaging/audio/video, file transfers, file/cloud browser, … just to name a some.
– Being reported so many backers were asking for a skype functionality – they may have had something different in mind than an integrated messenger “for everything”. This had been the point where I see a good potential for Jitsi, as it is offering “skype-like” experience without the MS downside.
– Increased energy consumption of Jitsi is not an issue. My wife & I come along very comfortably on battery throughout the ordinary business day – fetching emails every 15min, WLAN/3G on, private internet browsing, occational gaming with the Jitsi Android alpha client running continuously for 10-12hrs.
Of course sleekness & efficiency are at least good practice when it comes to multi-tasking.
In the end jolla knows the possibilities & trade-offs 😉
中文翻译请戳这里/For Chinese translation pls visit: jolla.becomes.today/a-look-at-jolla-tablet-backers/
Thx Jolla, good night 🙂
修正一下链接/Fix URL: http://jolla.becomes.today/a-look-at-jolla-tablet-backers/
谢谢你，Tyler!
哈，能出一份力是我的荣幸:)
@Carol Chen…Beautiful work. Thank you! More. Give me more…
Are you sure that there were really 100%, who have voted for the FB-app? I haven’t voted for. And I can’t believe that I’m the only one. I always thought the Sailfish users have a little more concerns about privacy.
Me nein faceboche gevoted!
The results are rounded off, but I’ll double check, thanks Fellfrosch!
I am a woman, 67 and I promoted Jolla to my husband. I joined the questionnaire: no Facebook on my smartphone or tablet. I boycot Facebook.So I don’t inderstand the 100 %. Nevertheless Ivoted for Skype. I know Skype is a spy. Don’t have it on my Jolla yet. There appears to be a kind of law nowadays : whoever is the first with some invention, he/she wins. Therefore it is so difficult to avoid facebook and Skype, etc.
Firefox does have an alternative: hello. Who uses it? Who will use Jitsi?
How many people use Facetime (Apple), which is a reasonable safe video messaging?
I can’t beleive that either.
I haven’t voted for FB-app either. And I was expecting that Sailfish users use Facebook less than the average Android / iOS user…
Also didn’t vote Facebook… I’d vote against if I could! Please clarify this “100%” indicator.
Also very surprised by that, I’m not using Facebook either (and definitely stated this accordingly in the survey). Agree with you on the privacy inclinations of Sailfish users, too.
I do not use neither Facebook nor Skype, and of course didn’t vote for them. I guess I was “rounded off” 🙂
Jesus Christ, 100%!.. If what Carol Chen said is true, it means that less than 0.5% (23 people tops) didn’t vote for Fecesbook. So far 7 people (incl. me) commented about that here. I guess all of us can actually do a roll call here. And this is very sad.
Carol thank you for taking the time to communicate and sharing this information. it is such a relief to hear Jolla is using this survey to form a great product. I am another one who did not vote for facebook. I am in the open source camp.
“Do many Finns use their phones and tablets in English or even Swedish?”
Uhum the latter is an official language here in Finland. Linus Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn… living in the US since a couple of decades though. 🙂
I somehow missed out on the questionnaire. Notwithstanding the same, the availability of an application like Google Keep or One Note or Evernote would be of immense help. I have a few more suggestions – 1.tweetian doesn’t have a timestamp for the tweets. 2. The phone app could be enhanced to indicate call logs separately, viz., dialled, missed, received. 3. Calendar app needs to be improved so that all tasks or events could be viewed at a glance.
yeah ,i can see this blog in chinese,love you Tyler…
On Native applications, I just have one comment to make. Sailfish office and Browser have been made open source and hosted on github and browser gained private browsing, Documents app got password support, search capabilities, etc. Now, with such support from community, why are we not seeing more official applications take the FOSS route? What is so proprietary about Calculator app!?
Great background info… somewhat disturbing though. I find it interesting that so many Jolla supporters are currently using an iPad. I’d have thought those camps are mutually exclusive because you just cannot use iOS when at the same time you support freedom, independence and openness. For the same reason, I’m baffled to learn how many Jolla supporters have no problem using Skype or Facebook. Interesting. Very interesting.
I have no problem using iOS (although I admit I haven’t owned an iOS device since the first iPhone). I don’t see a problem with me backing freedom, independence and openness, while still appreciating the incredible amount of effort Apple has put into making their products simple and user-friendly. (And I also appreciate Apple’s decision to go with unix-based OSs across their product line, but that’s just me.) And, while I have to also admit I don’t really use Facebook myself, my friends and family are all using it, so I can’t really stay away from it completely.
Ultimately, I’m a fan of the free market. Lots of people are using Apples and Skype and Facebook because they _want_ to use these products. There’s something to be said for that.
I voted for Facebook.. it’s not that I don’t have concerns about my privacy, it’s that everybody uses it, and I’m in a demographic where most of my social life is organised through facebook. I could go elsewhere, or opt out of social networks altogether but I’d miss a lot – so I accept an amount of risk & do what I can to mitigate it.
Same deal with Skype – sure there are better options, but migrating the relatives in other countries on to them is harder than it sounds.
If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum – it can be quickly removed from public view by ‘forum sliding.’ In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly prepositioned on the forum and allowed to ‘age.’ Each of these misdirectional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a ‘forum slide.’
Point being what does demographic information have to do with anything?
Hey now, some of us are interested in this kind of stuff! 🙂 (If you think one of the blog entries here is somehow embarrassing, just go ahead and point it out. If you’re making a dig about Jolla having trouble with their tablet hardware, it certainly seems to me that they’ve been up-front about that fact…)
I see an attempt her to put the TOHKBD project in bad daylight!
But case, screen protector and stand are non-interacting add-ons for the tablet. The others really add functionality to the device. And then you see stylus and keyboard as the top 2! Clearly it shows that people are unhappy with using fingers on the touch screens. So stylus for screen oriented interactions and keyboard for text based interaction.
So if I were you I would give more priority to keyboard and stylus instead of making it sound as unimportant features.
I for on would love top see a TOHKBD version for the tablet! I would have chosen it above the 32 to 64 GB upgrade
You misunderstand me 🙂 I love the TOHKBD, have one for my Jolla, and have no intention ever of showing it in a bad light!
As said, I’m also surprised the demand for keyboards wasn’t higher, given the success of TOHKBD with the phone. However, the results are what they are from those who have answered the questionnaire, I am not making up the numbers or graphs!
Glad you love TOHKBD.
But I do not agree the demand is low. The fact that it is second next to stylus after removing the ‘packaging’ options, and even is before headset, or more storage and higher battery shows me there is a HIGH demand for keyboards…
Or in numbers, almost 1 in 4 wants it.
I don’t think there is a 1 in 4 TOHKBD demand for the Jolla phone, is it?
I’ll disagree — the demand for a phone with a keyboard should be much higher than for a tablet with a keyboard! 🙂 There are just way, way too few phones that have built-in keyboards, and trying to fiddle around with external peripherals when you’re carrying a phone around is a miserable experience.
On the other hand, you can easily get a device with the form-factor of a tablet that has an integrated keyboard — it’s called a “laptop”. 🙂 The real value of a tablet is that you’ve got a big display in your hands, but doesn’t require anything extra. And if you really want to use a keyboard with something the size of a tablet, you’ll probably have to be sitting down anyway, so having an external keyboard isn’t nearly as big a problem. (And with USB-OTG, we will hopefully be able to plug any sort of keyboard into it, not just use bluetooth keyboards…)
Is it somehow possible to contact and collaborate with Valve for a “special” version of some kind of “Sailfish OS Steam App” for Voice and Chat purposes? It works well but does not have video.
Yes, it is my crazy idea but who knows?
But, I understand that we might not see Sailfish 3.0 then. 🙂