Hands On With Jolla’s First Phone — The “Spearhead Device” For Its MeeGo-Successor Sailfish OS

The first handset from Finnish smartphone startup Jolla is simply called Jolla. This phone has been some two years in the making - a timeframe that testifies to the complexity of building handset hardware and a new mobile platform, not to mention rallying developers and achieving Android compatibility. So really two years ain't bad for a plucky startup whose members used to work for erstwhile king-of-the-mobile-world, Nokia, and left to do what that phone maker decided it couldn't: make a go of MeeGo as an alternative to Google's all-consuming Android.

What was MeeGo on Nokia's N9 is now Sailfish on Jolla's eponymous handset. The Jolla phone finally launched on Wednesday, in Helsinki, with the first 450 devices taken home mainly by those who had already registered their interest via a pre-sales campaign. Jolla is now shipping handsets to other pre-orderers throughout Europe. The top three countries for pre-sales were, in order of popularity, Finland (as you'd expect), Germany and the U.K.

TechCrunch got hands-on with Jolla's first phone for a few hours at a London press event, where two co-founders, Marc Dillon and Sami Pienimäki, were also on hand to answer questions.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/30/jolla-first-phone/