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Happy New Year 2019 all Sailfishers!

It’s time to wrap up 2018, celebrate the New Year and look forward to 2019. For Jolla and Sailfish, 2018 was a year of a major milestones and steady progress in our regional licensing strategy.

In March we got a new partner, Rostelecom PLC, to join as a strategic investor to Sailfish agenda and bring a lot of muscle and speed to Sailfish development in Russia. Thanks to this, the ecosystem in Russia grew significantly during 2018 and Open Mobile Platform LLC (our licensing customer in Russia) grew the network to over 100 ecosystem partners developing various native Sailfish apps and backend solutions, started offering Sailfish coding classes in universities and 3 new Sailfish mobile devices, to name a few of the areas of progress.

Further, the regional agenda in Latin American markets with our partner Jalasoft progressed nicely and the first Sailfish product Accione P started the sales for corporate sector customers in September. 

2018 was also the year of Sailfish 3, the third generation of Sailfish OS, bringing both the operating system and the machinery producing it to a whole new level and packetizing the support for multitude of corporate solutions and platforms. Sailfish 3 refreshes the user experience and improves the overall performance up to 50%, thanks to the rewritten way to launch apps and load views, and the upcoming Qt upgrade.

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Sailfish 3 also extends the platform support to new chipsets from major vendors. During 2018 we productized support for MediaTek chipsets in full commercial level, and started to support it in various devices such as Inoi tablets and the Gemini PDA . Also we started several projects with our customers on other chipset platforms, which we are looking forward to productize during 2019.

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Sailfish X Program

During 2018 we continued the Sailfish community program, Sailfish X offering downloadable Sailfish OS, by extending the support to the full range of Sony Xperia XA2 product variants and Gemini PDA. Also, for all those users willing to use Android apps in Sailfish, Sailfish 3 introduces a major upgrade with the support of Android 8.1 apps.

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The Sailfish ecosystem grew significantly in 2018, in number of users, partners, apps, devices and platforms supported. During 2018 we were also happy to welcome many new employees to the Jolla team in Finland, and a steadily growing number of Sailfish community users enjoying Sailfish X.

These set a great starting point for another Sailfish year to come. I want to use this opportunity to thank all Sailfish partners and fans for the successful year 2018 and wish all the best of success for you all and Sailfish OS – Happy New Year 2019!

 

Cheers,

Sami

sami_round

Sami Pienimäki

CEO & Co-founder of Jolla Ltd. Opportunistic entrepreneur,

loves family, skiing and cars.

34 Comments

  1. Avatar

    Happy New Year Jolla!

  2. Avatar

    Have a happy new year Jolla, I am still using …

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    Quote @Sami Pienimäki: >Sailfish 3 introduces a major upgrade with the support of Android 8.1 apps.<

    So you confirm Android 8.1 support will definitely come to all supported Sailfish X devices including the XperiaX ?!

    … sorry couldn't resist 😉

    Happy New Year to all Sailors around the world, even to those living on motor-ships like me

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      +1 for Xperia X. Happy new year 2019 for everyone everywhere on the ground and over seas. 🙂 🙂

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      +1 here too for Android 8.1 support for Xperia X

  4. Avatar

    Happy New Year Jolla. Looking forward to what you produce in 2019.

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    Thank you Sami! Also happy new Y2K Version 19 for you and your Family!
    Keep the good work in 2019, and lets see official SailfishOS on more Devices like Gemini PDA soon!

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    Very merry new year to all. Sailfish OS will konquer this planet on 2019!

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    What are future plans for India ?

  8. Avatar

    HAPPY 2019 Captain Jolla !

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    Well….. I hope you keep your promises cos’ this is the last year I’ll use sailfish otherwise. After the last year using android again, it’s made me realise how nothing’s changed, the users aren’t listened to and just using SFOS is hard work and beset with hoops to jump through, no native apps to speak of, no encouragement for devs to make them. Fingers crossed for big changes, you need them.

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      Sadly, I have to agree. Less promises, more action please.

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      Even here in Finland and Europe we need Sailfish mobile devices, you cant ring with the OS.

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        That’s true. I’d like to see a Sailfish Device with a camera at least comparable to my Lumia 950. Actual Sailfish devices are just middle class phones – what Sailfish need to compete in Europe is a high-end phone.
        The OS itself should close its gaps like WLAN calls, RCS support, and even lossless audio (ALAC support).

  10. Avatar

    Happy New Year!
    Congratulations with a lot of sound accomplishments during 2018, which bodes well for the future.

    I’m really expectant of the upcoming release for the XA2, which I bought due to reviews mentioning garbled voice during calls in the other ‘jollable’ Xperia’s. Love to get back to daily use detached from Google Corporate Herding and still being able to run some selected Android apps, having been exciled in Android land since I gave up on the daily use of Jolla phone.

  11. Avatar

    Happy New Year!
    I wish you to close refund case in 2019!

  12. Avatar

    I would strongly advise a new year resolution for Jolla :

    A weekly “What happened last week at Jolla” blog.

    Have an intern go around developers – maybe just sum up what are the currently worked on things, maybe even interview one developer and do some “highlight” piece about some specific project and its challenges.

    No need to make big “feature XyZ will finally come on date AbC” announcement on every single blog piece. Just simple “daily life at Jolla while we’re working” is already very good to keep your audience updated.

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      every two weeks or even four weeks would also be fine… no need to present only highlights… sometimes the low lights can also be interesting…

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      Jolla absolutely needs a big change in it’s communication policy and has done so for years. From what I’ve gathered their policy has every single Jolla blog post needing to be approved by several upper-level managers meaning that there’s not just very little communication, it’s also not timely by any definition of the word.

      I don’t think they even understand how frustrating their slow and often very uncommitted responses are to legitimate customer questions and concerns. This also isn’t exactly helped by how difficult they seem to find making consequential decisions like how they still don’t seem to have a decision on if they’re going to improve the Android support on the Xperia X.

      Then again Finnish companies in general tend to suck pretty badly when it comes to communication. You’d think that they’d see the trend with how common it is, but apparently not.

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      @DrYak I suggest a montly update, but done by some pro staff, not the intern.

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        The problem with a pro staff is that they’ll cost some money if they are quality pros.
        And money is something that isn’t currently extremely widely available at Jolla (see progress of refunding).

        An intern would also help thing being more informal.
        (Thus also not needing to go through 10 management layers for approval before getting online)

    • Avatar

      I totally second this proposal of frequent “what are we working on” updates to at least get some insights into what Jolla is doing.
      I have supported and shared the Jolla vision of providing an alternative to the locked down phone OS market for years now, but as already mentioned by many people, the communication to end customers and reaction on their most legitimate requests is simply insufficient. Frustrating even the most faithful supporters cannot be the way to go!
      Most of these supporters (like me) quite likely also jumped on the Sailfish X train. Please don’t let them down now with an uncompleted, still only limited usable system. Please listen to at least the mostly reported bugs and feature requests.
      Happy new year.

  13. Avatar

    btw. happy new year;)

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    My new-year-greatings are coming soon…

    Sent from my sony xa2

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    So, been running XA2 with SF3 for almost a month now

    The Good:
    * Great to finally have a decent sharp screen after the J1
    * Chose the XA2 in a nice blue and it neatly matches one of the Jolla wallpapers
    *Speakers are nice and loud

    The Bad:
    *Keeps dropping the 4G – usually defaults to 2G.
    *Battery is crap! OMG, one of the reasons why i cant use my J1 is that the battery cant last a full day, Im now back to square one with the XA2!
    *Calls – screen doesnt lock it self midcall so repeatedly putting callers on hold or mute.
    *The ambiences – Previously would use a background image that would take up 3 screens of scrolling, now it’s only one?
    *The gestures – sorry but i preferred the way that sailfish worked in previous versions.
    *Open Tabs – I liked that previously you could refresh an internet tab or open a new one. Now each tile appears to be limited to only one actioned when minimised?
    *Internet Browser – this is probably one of my biggest gripes. Surfing the web with the XA2 is woeful, I’ve stopped going to some websites because of how badly SF seems to deal with them.

    Future updates had better resolve most of the above or I’m jumping from this ship!

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      Yep agree with most , if Jolla not fix some and make sure SFOS is working properly (basic version, without patches etc), I will leave this sinking ship also .

  16. Avatar

    Please Jolla, even if no big announcement is ready, make a short update just telling what’s currently being done, example of bugs and problems that the dev are currently fighting, etc.

    Basic communication.

  17. Avatar

    Happy Full Refund year !
    Let’s see if the management of Jolla still remembers there founding fathers …. The people who backed the funds to buy a tablet but never got anything other than false promises of refunds that they are still waiting on.

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