So, Jolla, what are you working on now? 'There are things that the world hasn't seen yet'
Summary: Jolla's handset release this week is the culmination of two years' hard graft. How did the Finnish startup manage it - and what's it working on next? — Jo Best
Context & Ripple Effects
Jolla's launch week closes a two-year arc that the corpus has tracked step by step: the first hardware reveal in May set out a 4.5-inch, Android-app-compliant handset at 399 euros, and last week the former-Nokia-staff startup finally put the phone on sale. The reception was mixed — an Engadget hands-on three days earlier judged it good intentions, badly delivered.
Against that backdrop, this ZDNet interview by Jo Best does two things: frames the handset as the culmination of those two years, and floats — explicitly unconfirmed — that more products are in the pipeline, echoing the March pitch where Jolla talked up concept devices like a Foursquare phone or a Facebook phone. The interview is less news than positioning: a young OEM trying to hold attention past a rocky first review cycle.
First-order effects
- Jolla's immediate task is converting launch-week buyers into a user base despite the 'bad delivery' verdict from early reviews — software polish and update cadence now carry the brand more than specs.
Second-order effects
- If the hinted follow-up products are real, they would extend Jolla's differentiation beyond commodity hardware toward services-tied devices, the same territory it sketched with the Facebook- and Foursquare-phone ideas back in March; rivals and app partners would watch whether Sailfish's Android compliance widens or narrows that appeal.
Third-order effects
- Jolla is one of the clearest tests of whether ex-Nokia talent can sustain an independent European mobile platform outside the iOS-and-Android duopoly — if the pattern holds, small OEMs survive not on handsets alone but on licensing their OS and platform bets to others.
The trend: Post-Nokia Finland is attempting a mobile comeback built on independent platforms rather than flagship hardware, with Jolla's handset-to-platform pivot as the leading data point.