Nokia N900 was really great, Jolla has some of the former team people.
I only jumped into Android after my Symbian phone died, and by then Symbian Belle, with QT and PIPS (PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian OS), it was already shapping great.
What does full-stack mean here?
Phone is fully produced in Europe?
Software and online storage fully provided by European company?
edit: I want this phone, I have reserved a slot in the coming batch.
Just posing as an average Joe here, someone who does not host their own storage, calendar, contacts, phone tracking, remote wipe, the "free" features Google and Apple are known for on their phones.
Usually 'full stack' just means software. Here it means a true Linux phone (Sailfish OS) plus Android compatibility with sandboxing. The C2 model is made in Turkey from Asian parts. The new phone is manufactured in Asia, but the final assembly, QA, and software flashing are done in Finland.
This isn't for people with a consumer mindset. It’s for people who want a Linux computer in their pocket, more privacy, and still want to run some Android apps.
There are phones that can run "true Linux" out there, and there even are ports of Sailfish OS for some of them, but Jolla phones were never part of those and rely on Android drivers instead.
But even the full software stack isn't European as it runs on a Mediatek platform (ie. all the cellular stack and platform software is from Mediatek, which is from Taiwan). It's the apps software stack on top of the Linux kernel that is potentially "European".
There are no longer any cellular chipset vendors based in Europe, afaik, so there's really no alternative. It's also hard to see how they will ever again be one.
Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities. Most companies offer them only for iOS and Android.
If your smartphone can't run the vast majority of apps, it is basically dead on arrival. Nobody is going to buy it when they need to carry another phone anyways.
The only way around this is either emulation (which Google is trying very hard to sabotage) or heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms. I don't think either option is likely to work.
They don’t need to specifically support “niche platforms,” which will never happen anyway. They just need to support the one, universal platform every device (be it phone, laptop or desktop) can always access, the web.
First, it is not European alternative - it is Finnish. _Europe_ is not a single country. I will keep reminding about that.
Second, don't really care. Any political actor, be it state or super-state actor like EU, that is serious about tech sovereignty should start subsidizing its own tech sector and properly fund domestic R&D to create truly independent solutions, and pass law to legally oblige all its institutions to support these solutions. I may be sympathetic to the idea, but some Linux-based smartphone is in practice useless to me if the main government app in my country only supports Android and iOS, and my banking app requires Google Play Services.
Folks, tech sovereignty is a political decision, not a consumer choice. Start making demands on your leaders, as their sole purpose is to make policies and this is why they live off your taxes. Do not satisfy yourself with empty consumer gestures.
You're correct but erven more it is a Chinese platform with a Chinese cellular stack that runs linux and on top of all that the apps software is Finnish (so "European").
It all starts with open formats, open data and open apis. Unless this is somehow guaranteed by law for interaction with public entities, it's going to be hard for any FOSS projects or independent apps/developers.
Without that, we have a situation where almost every bank tries to shove their stupid android app in your face so they can more easily track you. They also force you to their authentication mechanisms, instead of using already working ones. There are no APIs that are usable, only if you have $$$$$. They'll just ignore you if you're a regular client and want to download your data automatically via a reasonable mechanism, etc.
If only banks can write apps and have closed API, they will
I noticed that the orders hasn't bumped up that much since this was shared last time. Not really sure I see the growth here is showing a lot of demand for a European smartphone - although I could totally be wrong given the geopolitical situation.
Well done, congratulations. My next phone will certainly be European to the root. Will be nice to come preinstalled with some free European (apps, socials and video hosting, like Vivaldi browser, HugstonOne local AI, Protonmail, Libreoffice, w-social, vimeo, mastodon, lemmy etc.
That definitely seems to be the better alternative amongst all others. While I appreciate all the energy put into graphene or lineage it appears to me like way too much energy for Half baked solutions. Depending on google good will in the future too. I can understand them as hack, not that much as industrial proposals.
This is the third phone on the HN main page. I’m happy to see this flurry of work at real competition in the market, but I hope the companies can survive and respond to CSVEs.
Yeah but the core issue is that all apps for digital services for both private and government, at least in my EU country, are only shipped for the iOS/Android duopoly.
So having yet another 100th FOSS linux phone that won't run those apps is pointless until apps for these phones are shipped with feature parity, and they probably won't get shipped until these phones reach some critical mass adoption, and they won't get critical mass adoption because they don't run the popular apps.
That's fair, but in my experience for many people the camera and/or battery are the main reasons to upgrade to a new phone (Also the reason why the presentations focus on the camera for a big chunk of time usually I'd guess) so if they want to compete with that it makes sense to have a decent camera.
It is enabled by smartphone reviewers excluding it from thickness measurements. I bet camera bumps would be a lot less prominent if they were clearly represented.
Other comments have links to more details, but in short: do not support this company.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
You're probably responding because of the Jolla tablet :)
To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.
That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.
This project has been going for years. Good to see it lives on.
IMO there's a paradox with these privacy-focused mobile solutions. Just as with the expensive flagship corporate devices, the massive price tags suggest an assumption that we are doing all our computing on mobile. That's now the case for most normies. But for anyone who really cares about their privacy (not to mention sanity), there's a better solution available: repatriate most of one's computing to a laptop. At which point all these mobile devices become unjustifiably expensive. Hence the paradox.
PS: downvoting a reasoned opinion, apart from being lazy and toxic in any community, does not constitute a rebuttal.
huge notch and huge bottom bezel with mediocre Mediatek Dimensity 7100, all this for 650EUR with specs worse than 200EUR phones, that's like 450EUR for software, a bit high surcharge...
The notch is a bit silly, given that you have the bezel at the bottom, but I guess it could be ergonomics.
I believe the phone is designed around feedback for customers/potential customers. Which tells me that other people have very different phone usage from my own. I would have asked for a much smaller phone and a €200 price tag. The processor and even a shitty camera doesn't really bother me. I just want a cheap phone that can run like five apps (sadly one is the type that won't work, i.e. payments), and not run Android or iOS.
It's what you get when you have no phone manufacturing supply chains anymore because you shipped them all to China 20+ years ago then lost the OS wars to Apple and Google leaving you with no local phone industry. Then it's gonna cost you through the nose when you're making, what are now to your industry, niche low volume items.
Remember when you could buy EU made Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons? Even the chargers were made in Finland back then.
I think of those two, the OS wars is the much more substantial EU/US difference. It's not like Apple is making much hardware in the US, yet they wade in pools of cash.
what good cameras? all I see is "Sony" without mentioning chip, even cheap phones like Poco X7 Pro or similar have nowadays comparable cameras as what they claim
HN discussion from four months ago, including reports from people who have been using Jolla phones for some time (e.g., me):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785840
Nokia N900 was really great, Jolla has some of the former team people.
I only jumped into Android after my Symbian phone died, and by then Symbian Belle, with QT and PIPS (PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian OS), it was already shapping great.
That Burning Memo was really a downer.
What does full-stack mean here? Phone is fully produced in Europe? Software and online storage fully provided by European company?
edit: I want this phone, I have reserved a slot in the coming batch.
Just posing as an average Joe here, someone who does not host their own storage, calendar, contacts, phone tracking, remote wipe, the "free" features Google and Apple are known for on their phones.
Usually 'full stack' just means software. Here it means a true Linux phone (Sailfish OS) plus Android compatibility with sandboxing. The C2 model is made in Turkey from Asian parts. The new phone is manufactured in Asia, but the final assembly, QA, and software flashing are done in Finland.
This isn't for people with a consumer mindset. It’s for people who want a Linux computer in their pocket, more privacy, and still want to run some Android apps.
There are phones that can run "true Linux" out there, and there even are ports of Sailfish OS for some of them, but Jolla phones were never part of those and rely on Android drivers instead.
But even the full software stack isn't European as it runs on a Mediatek platform (ie. all the cellular stack and platform software is from Mediatek, which is from Taiwan). It's the apps software stack on top of the Linux kernel that is potentially "European".
There are no longer any cellular chipset vendors based in Europe, afaik, so there's really no alternative. It's also hard to see how they will ever again be one.
When I first read the headline I thought all hardware components are European as well. Seems like it's referring to the software stack only.
The previous Jolla C2 phone was built by Reeder in Turkey - they don't seem to say anything about the new phone
Apparently "full-stack alternative" means "layered on top of Android" these days, as Jolla does with libhybris.
From what I understand it's the opposite, an android compatibility thing layered on top of a linux base.
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The most important question missing from the FAQ is whether bank apps, government ID apps, etc. will work with this phone.
Everything hinges on app support.
Smartphone apps have unfortunately become a hard requirement for basic day-to-day activities. Most companies offer them only for iOS and Android.
If your smartphone can't run the vast majority of apps, it is basically dead on arrival. Nobody is going to buy it when they need to carry another phone anyways.
The only way around this is either emulation (which Google is trying very hard to sabotage) or heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms. I don't think either option is likely to work.
They don’t need to specifically support “niche platforms,” which will never happen anyway. They just need to support the one, universal platform every device (be it phone, laptop or desktop) can always access, the web.
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>heavy-handed regulation forcing app developers to also support niche platforms.
should work for banking and governmental applications, especially as those should already have the workflow in place to support niche platforms.
There is a Wiki maintained by users. In short, it depends :)
https://sailfishos.wiki/books/compatibility-list-of-android-...
[dead]
First, it is not European alternative - it is Finnish. _Europe_ is not a single country. I will keep reminding about that.
Second, don't really care. Any political actor, be it state or super-state actor like EU, that is serious about tech sovereignty should start subsidizing its own tech sector and properly fund domestic R&D to create truly independent solutions, and pass law to legally oblige all its institutions to support these solutions. I may be sympathetic to the idea, but some Linux-based smartphone is in practice useless to me if the main government app in my country only supports Android and iOS, and my banking app requires Google Play Services.
Folks, tech sovereignty is a political decision, not a consumer choice. Start making demands on your leaders, as their sole purpose is to make policies and this is why they live off your taxes. Do not satisfy yourself with empty consumer gestures.
> First, it is not European alternative - it is Finnish. _Europe_ is not a single country.
What are you talking about?
Is there a law of nature that you can only refer to origins in terms of countries.
A Finnish alternative is, nyt extension, a European alternative.
It is not innocent like this. In this context _European_ is not simply used as a geographical designation of origin.
No one says that Samsung or Huawei phones are _Asian_ alternatives to iPhone.
You're correct but erven more it is a Chinese platform with a Chinese cellular stack that runs linux and on top of all that the apps software is Finnish (so "European").
It is a very misleading title, indeed.
It all starts with open formats, open data and open apis. Unless this is somehow guaranteed by law for interaction with public entities, it's going to be hard for any FOSS projects or independent apps/developers.
Without that, we have a situation where almost every bank tries to shove their stupid android app in your face so they can more easily track you. They also force you to their authentication mechanisms, instead of using already working ones. There are no APIs that are usable, only if you have $$$$$. They'll just ignore you if you're a regular client and want to download your data automatically via a reasonable mechanism, etc.
If only banks can write apps and have closed API, they will
Support for open formats and data is also question of policy.
I noticed that the orders hasn't bumped up that much since this was shared last time. Not really sure I see the growth here is showing a lot of demand for a European smartphone - although I could totally be wrong given the geopolitical situation.
The preorder did hit 10k, this is the normal order screen
If they were smart they would show those number here. It's like walking past an empty restaurant.
What's the sandboxing & app permissions story like on Sailfish OS? Is it just ordinary Linux, i.e. apps can basically do anything?
They use a custom-made Firejail-based solution called SailJail: https://github.com/sailfishos/sailjail
Well done, congratulations. My next phone will certainly be European to the root. Will be nice to come preinstalled with some free European (apps, socials and video hosting, like Vivaldi browser, HugstonOne local AI, Protonmail, Libreoffice, w-social, vimeo, mastodon, lemmy etc.
That definitely seems to be the better alternative amongst all others. While I appreciate all the energy put into graphene or lineage it appears to me like way too much energy for Half baked solutions. Depending on google good will in the future too. I can understand them as hack, not that much as industrial proposals.
What's the difference between this and the Fairphone?
This is the third phone on the HN main page. I’m happy to see this flurry of work at real competition in the market, but I hope the companies can survive and respond to CSVEs.
Will it have USB C with DisplayPort alt mode?
No final word as of yet, but in their most recent forum update [1] less than 2 weeks ago they said this is "unlikely for now".
[1] https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/jolla-phone-update-lights-on-...
I think they're working on it, but it isn't sure yet.
Jolla has announced a new phone using its Sailfish OS so providing a full-stack European alternative to the Android/Apple duopoly.
Yeah but the core issue is that all apps for digital services for both private and government, at least in my EU country, are only shipped for the iOS/Android duopoly.
So having yet another 100th FOSS linux phone that won't run those apps is pointless until apps for these phones are shipped with feature parity, and they probably won't get shipped until these phones reach some critical mass adoption, and they won't get critical mass adoption because they don't run the popular apps.
Check out this thread on Sailfish OS forums regarding EU Banking apps. I was surprised on how many actually work.
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/banking-apps-on-sailfish-os/1...
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Jolla phones can run Android apps.
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This looks really cool. Orange, black and white being inspired by scandinavian design felt like a bit of a reach though.
The OS is proprietary.
I heard and read negative things about them, do they actually ship?
I bought the pre-order thing, but not sure what to expect - I guess to get an email at some point so I can buy it..
I hate the camera bump trend. I don’t need a super fancy camera, just give me something half decent and flush with the device.
The original iPhone SE was the last time I enjoyed a phone’s design.
That's fair, but in my experience for many people the camera and/or battery are the main reasons to upgrade to a new phone (Also the reason why the presentations focus on the camera for a big chunk of time usually I'd guess) so if they want to compete with that it makes sense to have a decent camera.
It is enabled by smartphone reviewers excluding it from thickness measurements. I bet camera bumps would be a lot less prominent if they were clearly represented.
You might like the Pixel 10a/9a, they have an almost flush back. For this thread, not european but instead GrapheneOS capable.
Other comments have links to more details, but in short: do not support this company.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
You're probably responding because of the Jolla tablet :)
To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.
That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.
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This looks interesting. https://e.foundation/e-os/
I mean 600+ euros is kind of a steep price, doubt I'll ever consider buying one because of that alone.
Also, as an italian, Jolla reminds me a lot of the word "Ciolla", which you can only guess what it's a slang for. That doesn't help.
true, spaniards are confused too
This project has been going for years. Good to see it lives on.
IMO there's a paradox with these privacy-focused mobile solutions. Just as with the expensive flagship corporate devices, the massive price tags suggest an assumption that we are doing all our computing on mobile. That's now the case for most normies. But for anyone who really cares about their privacy (not to mention sanity), there's a better solution available: repatriate most of one's computing to a laptop. At which point all these mobile devices become unjustifiably expensive. Hence the paradox.
PS: downvoting a reasoned opinion, apart from being lazy and toxic in any community, does not constitute a rebuttal.
'Approve this transaction in your smartphone app'. That is the killer.
if it doesn't run GNOME Mobile or KDE it isn't an alternative
> a full-stack European alternative
It is absolutely not. More than misleading title.
People are jumping on this "EU sovereignty" thing band-wagon and milking it for all it's worth.
> It is absolutely not. More than misleading title.
Could you elaborate? Just disagreeing without explaining why doesn’t contribute to the discussion.
Boom immediately no value reply, as usual. You can follow the link and check on the phone instead of complaining that you are not being spoon-fed...
No, they just want to get away from Americans.
huge notch and huge bottom bezel with mediocre Mediatek Dimensity 7100, all this for 650EUR with specs worse than 200EUR phones, that's like 450EUR for software, a bit high surcharge...
The notch is a bit silly, given that you have the bezel at the bottom, but I guess it could be ergonomics.
I believe the phone is designed around feedback for customers/potential customers. Which tells me that other people have very different phone usage from my own. I would have asked for a much smaller phone and a €200 price tag. The processor and even a shitty camera doesn't really bother me. I just want a cheap phone that can run like five apps (sadly one is the type that won't work, i.e. payments), and not run Android or iOS.
Buy a Xperia XA2 on Ebay for 180€ + 25€ for SFOS license.
> I just want a cheap phone that can run like five apps (sadly one is the type that won't work, i.e. payments), and not run Android or iOS.
https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices#Community
you can certainly buy some of the supported smaller devices (e.g. Pixel 3a) and change battery for new
sadly basically nothing newer than 2020
It's what you get when you have no phone manufacturing supply chains anymore because you shipped them all to China 20+ years ago then lost the OS wars to Apple and Google leaving you with no local phone industry. Then it's gonna cost you through the nose when you're making, what are now to your industry, niche low volume items.
Remember when you could buy EU made Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons? Even the chargers were made in Finland back then.
As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not.
For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.
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I think of those two, the OS wars is the much more substantial EU/US difference. It's not like Apple is making much hardware in the US, yet they wade in pools of cash.
Can you really get 200EUR phones with that good cameras?
what good cameras? all I see is "Sony" without mentioning chip, even cheap phones like Poco X7 Pro or similar have nowadays comparable cameras as what they claim
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