You "welcome" this because the market needs to be shaken up "so badly", but won't buy it? What does that mean then, that you'll allow it to exist "no matter how flawed"? I'm genuinely confused as to what this is trying to say

Its a compact Linux PC in a phone form factor - especially if you do not install the Android emulation layer. :)

What otp are you using? You can ask in the forum of sailfishos if it runs

The PinePhone has 6 dip switches for this 1. modem, 2 Wifi/BT, 3. Mic 4, rear cam, 5. front cam, 6. headphone / serial port. They say it will stay in production for 2 more years, but a lot of the accessories (LoRa cover, keyboard, etc) are already gone.

If nothing else it is a fun platform to hack on. I'm currently hacking a toy OS for it, and the documentation for the SoC is fairly complete. I'd love an updated phone like this Jolly orange Jolla to hack on, but not at that price, and seems like it might be locked down.

Supply chain has left us.

Since there's no new development happening with small phones, we'd have to settle for "older spec" screens (IE, new stock iPhone 5 screens, with none of the colour accuracy, frame-rate etc improvements from the last 10 years).

People don't like "old spec", so they'd probably not buy those devices.

If you're a small player, then you're downstream of the supply chain, you don't make the rules.

Chicken and Egg problem.

Ironically people think there's no market for small phones due to apple making a "small phone" which had a larger screen size than an iPhone 6.. which was when phones started getting too big for me, and many people I spoke to.

So, you make a small phone that isn't actually small, it sells like poop so you presume that people don't want small phones..

Every now and then some phone manufacturer mistakes online sentiment for actual demand and gets burned making a mini phone that won’t sell

Dimensions: ~158 x 74 x 9mm

It's way too big for me. Anything above 71mm width is unconfortable to hold in one hand or pocket.

What about those of us that were expecting an earpiece and glasses with AR for calling by now?

> Supply chain has left us.

<rant>

Who made the decision? There are still so many of us wanting a compact phone, but the big tech companies (Google, Apple, etc.) said no, therefore we can't have it. Not only can we not have it, they also closed the door on everyone, now even if someone wants to service this section of the market, they can't. Because, yes, the supply chain has left us.

This is power - they are taking away our freedoms and anatomy. They are making decisions for us and we have absolutely no say.

</rant>

Compact phones is but one of examples. A more current example would be the rocketing DRAM price. We got do something to stop this, but I feel so powerless.

I've been IT operations for years, and when I order laptops I sometimes do a little experiment. If I ask people if they want a 15.6" laptop or a 13" laptop, they always say 15.6. If I don't give them a choice and just start buying 13" laptops, everybody tells me how much they love the smaller laptop, and people still on the 15.6" models start looking around asking when they can get the smaller one.

People don't know what they want unless you give it to them.

Librem 5 has 3 hardware kill switches that are easy to access. Even if you suddenly receive a call and your mic was off, you can immediately turn it on and speak.

Did you hear about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5

I hope not. Projects like that to have any chance at surviving have to be good phones first. Adding modularity will make it worse in terms of specs, more expensive and in the result dead on arrival. Once they launch a few successful (or at least sustainable) products, they can maybe try doing some modularity

I wonder if one can install Mobian on it.

You probably never used Maemo, whose UI (and also Palm's WebOS UI) were ripped off for later versions of Android and iOS, which wasn't even multitasking yet. Literally hired the same people to do them. Jolla started with the FOSS parts of Maemo but went proprietary.

If Nokia hadn't been intentionally destroyed by its board in a romance with Microsoft cash, through a Canadian snake, Maemo would have been a real contender. You can get an vague idea what it looked like from here: https://maemo-leste.github.io/

Also, I don't know what's motivating you to just make negative shit up from whole cloth. Where did Linux touch you?

> colour accuracy, frame-rate

Absolutely irrelevant for what I do with a phone, and I'd wager that 90% of users would not notice the difference.

Re us/we, you're not associated with Jolla, right? For clarity.

You know what, that is exactly what Lenovo executives were telling their customers right up until the moment that Apple released Retina devices. Lenovo swore in a blog post that because of the overall panel market it was quite impossible to put an IPS display in a laptop, then a few days later Apple released a 221 DPI 15" IPS MacBook Pro.

Yeah...like Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...

As someone holding onto their iPhone mini 13 for dear life, I hope they will release a one off in a few years once support for the 13 mini ends.

Only Apple would consider selling millions, but not tens of millions a failure.

What 5-ish inch screen phone has even been released within the past 5 years? The only ones I can think of are the Unihertz phones, and those don't get a single update after getting shoved out the door, not to mention that they're probably full of Chinese backdoors. I'd buy that exact phone in a heartbeat if it didn't have those problems, and all the other ones I've seen have similar dealbreakers.

Small phones are also way less addictive. It's not in the interest of the mobile ecosystem.

If it catches traction, there will be usb-connected phone cases that expose these switches to physical controls.

> As an American, I will order this phone as soon as it’s available to me!

It won’t be. From the time of their first phone the company actively made the choice to not support the US market. There’s the obvious spectrum difference and cost to certify, but the real reason they don’t want to touch it is litigation risk on patents and whatnot.

The practicality of that may depend on the exact details of the modem. For example, I believe it's possible to get a fairphone in the US, but last I checked it was a poor choice because it had awful support for cell frequencies actually in use. This lists "global roaming modem configuration" which may mean that it has good coverage, but... it also might not.

They have a history of not shipping. They took my money for a tablet pre-order but never shipped anything. Didnt offer refunds either.

Am I the only one who just feels burnt out on these type of projects? We have a plethora of raspberry pi and other arm mobile developer kits that all just fail to deliver. They make great pet projects but fail at what most mobile phones do great which is provide a computer I can reliably and safely take with me in life. This pilet thing has 7 hours of battery life, is huge and will probably explode if I put it in my bikes bag.

While it's not perfect I've been investing more time into learning to live with grapheneOS. I can run Emacs and clang on the go. It's a better start that won't turn into a paperweight.

They have been selling Sailfish X for selected Sony Xperia devices for years.

Can you explain this a bit more? What is closed about it?

Source please.

yep...

my lenovo laptop has a physical privacy switch for the camera... it's literally a piece of plastic that covers the lens, no way to bypass that (without physical access). I feel safe.

If it can be enabled in software, it can be disabled in software, and I don't trust software.

That website is asking for consent for allegedly anonymous statistics ("With your consent, we use cookies for anonymized statistics"). One doesn't need to ask for consent when you're not collecting personal data...

The only possible button is agree, but to read what you're agreeing to, you need to click agree first because this overlay also spawns on the privacy policy page that's linked from the cookie wall

The privacy information is also only available in German

10/10 privacy drive

we need a .olla TLD

It looks so. That is actually the second phone they are making since them and the first got quite good responses

Why?

Well, that could help drive the production numbers up, hopefully driving the per unit price down. :)

Time to move? :P

Hear, hear.

I once asked David Potter what happened post-symbian, and he smiled and shrugged

Variable frame rate screens aren’t just for making the phone feel snappier but are also needed for the battery to last longer.

If your production volume isn’t high enough to justify a custom screen to be cut you are stuck with what is available on the market.

And even if 5” screens are available now in the form of NOS or upcycled refurbs that may not be the case 2 or 3 not to mention 5+ years down the line.

So you have to go with what not only is available today but with what is still likely to be available throughout the expected usable lifetime of your product.

90% wouldn't notice, but of those 90%, 5% compared specs and got the phone with better color accuracy "just in case," and 95% just went to their local retailer and either bought the newest phone or the cheapest phone.

To clarify: no.

Though I suspect I worked with many staff members at Nokia. Their former CTO was my boss.

Currently going from 67mm to 71.2mm. And I kinda can expect pain. And that is pretty much the narrowest phone available on the market in traditional form. And I already can expect that grip won't be fully usable.

FYI, if you have an Apple Watch with LTE you can take facetime calls with it using your Airpods.

Feels kinda weird, definitely works.

(same for music)

And to my eternal puzzlement here's two companies that are made for one another and so far they've never worked together on a project. SMH...

Sailfish OS is better than GrapheneOS through virtue of being mostly a vanilla linux distribution with Android being just an optional bad dream.

That threw me off, too. They probably chose it to keep the costs low. I wonder about the overall impact, though.

Hmm, I at least received a refund on the tablet; I think half of it was paid out and half of it I opted to use as payment for Sailfish X.

An email I have stored from July 4th 2017 mentions "the tablet refund tool", so there seems to have been a concrete system for this refunding process as well. I abstractly remember something like that, though I must say my memory is shoddy and should not be trusted.

All phones end up reliant on proprietary blobs. Not that I disagree in principle, but we have to be realistic. Hardware manufacturers, telcoms and to some degree regulators all do not like user freedom with regards to phones.

Libhybris not halium, and those are open, the android driver blobs are closed and it's the same on pmOS with halium? They did start open sourcing a lot of their UI components recently, so hopefully this continues, we'll see

Again, starting from elements of Maemo is a surefire way to ship a ghastly user experience. The N800 that I still own had the most hostile UI of any device I ever bought with my own money. The reason it flopped was because it is really bad, not a great conspiracy.

Look at the TODOs for Maemo Leste, which you just referenced. "Phone calls should work, with audio, when alsamixer is set up properly". That is F-tier user experience. OpenMoko-level garbage.

I had iPhone 12 Mini and then 14 and now 17. I can't practically tell the difference except for battery life, weight, and size.

Are you really telling me that people wouldn't look at the spec-sheet and state (loudly) that they won't buy a phone because "in 2025 it doesn't even have 120fps"?

I don't believe you if that's the case.

They filled for bankruptcy again last year (first was the Tablet debacle in I think 2015) but have since managed to survive it again, so all is well. :)

I haven't tried a USB-C to 3.55mm adapter but your experience heartens me.

Headphone jack has been a hard line for me. Having recently moved into the world of wireless charging (I keep a phone 5-7 years and just missed wireless charging being normalized on my last phone purchase back in 2020) I think using the USB port for headphone is finally visible.

I spend a lot of the day with my headphones on and the phone on the wireless charging puck. Not being forced to choose between charging and headphones changes the equation.

That page caters to corporations who want to restrict employee phones - worst possible marketing for consumers.

Yeah - its a real daily usable thing on supported hardware & I have been using it on primary phone since 2013. :)

With all the latest Windows fuckups its picking up recently in the form of SteamOS and Bazzite.

The case argument really solves everything whenever someone brings up poor choices

- Annoying glass back that scratches immediately and slides out of your hand- "just put a case on it"

- Undersized battery that won't last a day - "you can buy a case with a battery"

- The phone wobbles when you lay it on a desk or nightstand - "most people use a case anyway"

If we're meant to make our phones twice as thick, why not sell it in that form factor? Stuff that extra battery in there, make the backside grippy, and have it be able to lay down without being like a 4-legged chair where 1 leg is longer

I've never used a case on any phone. They're big enough as it is (in the xy dimensions). I did try it out of necessity when needing 2 phones in 1 pocket (work and private phone) for a week during a work trip. It's doable but just why

You didn't need to create a new account just to say something that is not true ;)

You'd say that most people don't know about Linux phones, but for those who know, Volla running Ubuntu is pretty well known, at least in Europe.

I actually confused them many times, when I started researching Android alternatives and Linux phones. Now I learnt :)

A surprising amount of banking apps actually work. Check the forum. My two german banks were fine

Not even with the Android emulation layer?

Exactly. It'd be great a genuine collective European effort to make a Linux phone.

Another crucial point is to push for open standards for those apps that only work on Android or iOS.

It’s literally inferior security wise. The desktop Linux security model is antiquated when compared to the advances in security/isolation/etc that modern mobile phone OSs have developed.

It is not trumping Graphene any time soon.

Surprisingly even Samsung uses Mediatek in quite a few devices they sell.

This is the last response I have from them in my inbox (Sep 24, 2015, 8:56 AM). Never heard back from them after this inspite of repeated subsequent queries

----------------

Hi,

thank you for your message.

We are sending the invites out to contributors in groups according to the chronological order of contributions. Please also note that we are slowly ramping up the deliveries, starting with a smaller group to ensure that everything works as it should, but anticipate future groups to be bigger in size. This means that we are currently unable to estimate your exact order number in the queue.

To read all the latest on the Tablet campaign, please stay tuned to the Jolla Blog. For some commonly asked questions and answers, please see our Jolla Tablet Campaign FAQs.

Thank you again for your contribution!

Sincerely, Jolla Customer Care

Operating hours: Monday to Friday from 9.00 - 17.00 GMT +2; close weekends and public holidays (Finland).

Join the Movement @ jolla.com Like us on Facebook @ jollaofficial Follow on Twitter @ jollaHQ Dive deeper into the Jolla world @ Official Jolla Blog

Btw, Jolla created libhyris back in the day for the first Jolla phone in ~2013. It has been since used by other phones and comanies for various purposes when the only thing you have is a board with only Android bionic libc compiled blobs available.

I'm not the OP, but if you ask me, I'll tell you that I think most phone users out there don't even know what a fps is, let alone how many fps their smartphone has...

Yeah I feel like putting it closer to the SE lifecycle is must be a better decision than fully axing the mini lineup. If we get a mini 13, then a mini 19 or 20? I can live with that.

Right. We don’t know that Apple didn’t make money. Only that they didn’t make enough money. By whatever definition they used.

If 5-ish includes 5.7", then the Librem 5 that I'm typing this on would qualify. It's still borderline too big for my tastes though.

The platform always suffered from two big architectural missteps.

1 - the native browser being an old firefox/gecko fork embedded into their own UI framework, giving a poor performance and dated compatibility quirks 2 - the android emulating runtime meant that you get again, dated , poorly performing android apps, that you're driven towards because the browser engine was so poor.

these two mean you basically end up with a sub-standard android handset/UI, and a tiny market for native app development (because everyone made do with android), its a real chicken/egg.

In fairness I've not used it since the sony XPeria days, but it was my daily phone for 3-4 years since the Jolla 1. It was cool being able to emacs and irc natively on the phone, but that was limited in use cases tbh.

Correct me if I'm wrong but those cables must include a DAC to function properly and so usually have a tiny kinda crappy one in them, right?

In this post headphone jack world I use a fiio Bluetooth/USB DAC that's really good quality. But it's about the size of two ipod nanos stacked on top of each other.

IIRC they were negotiating a startup funding round that failed, so they ended unexpectedly up not having enough money to run the company let alone pay for the tablet manufacturing. Even remember hearing about the manufacturers selling the units with Android by the time they secured at least some funding for the company, so there was really nothing to salvage.

Or it might have just been their excuse back then - if you have some newer details of how it actually all went down with the tablet, please do share! :-)

While WhatsApp is not very much used in the US, in some other countries such as Brazil it is basically the primary form of "phone" communication. It is everyone's default text, voice and video message platform. People don't ask if you have WhatsApp there, they just assume it. You talk to your Bank/Investor manager using WhatsApp. You order pizza through WhatsApp. Customer Support for services is WhatsApp bots that send you to the correct places. If I don't have WhatsApp, I can't voice chat with my mom, she won't see her grandkids. If you have any sort of business, you need WhatsApp.

And yes, I do have Signal installed, and there are only 2 people who talk to me through it (one being my partner).

Phone carriers got too greedy charging for every single SMS message and phone call, WhatsApp took over when smartphones became popular.

To rephrase: Social contact is ultimately higher in my needs than technology choice.

This doesn’t show OS, sadly. Only a list of some features that nobody outside of geek cultures care. Show flashy videos, images, gorgeous animations.

If someone from jolla reads this: Just hire DHH as your hypeman, he’ll be able to sell anything to lemmings.

The market is small, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a significant overlap between those who want a keyboard and the target audience of the Jolla phone.

Don't forget that SailfishOS is ultimately Linux (and not like Android) - it even comes with the zypper package manager that lets you install apps and update the OS using the terminal. Part of the fun of using SailfishOS is doing familiar Linux systems managements and general operations the terminal, which any Linux nerd would love. And Linux nerds make up a huge userbase of this OS.

I mean, look at the link OP pasted, they're straight up calling it a "Linux phone", it's clear who their audience is. And don't tell me majority of Linux users would NOT prefer to have a keyboard.

Likewise; I had an N900, and I loved the idea of a physical keyboard, but now I figure I can pocket a folding keyboard for that.

What I would like is apps to pervasively support a keyboard. For instance, in most Android messaging apps, you can't even press "enter" to send a message, so if you want to use a physical keyboard, you have to type the message and then poke the screen to send.

>Ruthless monopoly building on both Google and Apple side IMHO.

Microsoft spent a lot of money and resources trying to compete and failed.

Android/Apple just started early enough and by 2012 it was too late as most consumers have decided. To enter this market you have to be truly unique or else you are just copying the competitor and why would users switch if they are happy enough?

Is that really a monopoly if you had a third competitor come in and try?

Bluetooth barely works on Android.

I have no confidence in it working constantly on a new OS like this.

This is nonsense. They cant force vendors to support them, so the only viable strategy is to support the vendors. And they can, but they decided not to.

Support for vital features needed for normal life is a must. And all available resources should be put into it as it is making their OS viable for usage. No android application support, no users.

I have struggled for 2 years. Most users wont.

I would phrase it differently - many European banks choose hard dependency on proprietary technology provided by two non-EU duopolists (Apple and Google) that don't answer to anyone.

And they usually don't provide a suitable alternative, as actually secure solution based on something like a yubikey.

GrapheneOS' main selling point is security. Is Sailfish OS better at that, or at least in the same league, nowadays?

Isn't the Librem 5 fully open?

But AOSP is open source while Sailfish OS is not. Also "proprietary blobs" != "proprietary blobs" (there's varying level of obfuscation/debug info).

Two words: Nokia N9.

It will be pretty imperceivable when you stay within the same ecosystem. If you went from your 17 and then went to a mid tier phone like a Samsung A71, you would notice a difference.

Display is something I for sure started paying attention to when I was jumping back and forth between Android and Apple when I went from my OnePlus to Apple and then to Samsung noticed differences.

I've never looked at the spec sheet when I bought a phone.

Apple definitely has the grunt I'm talking about to push the supply chain to change.

Same experience here, though from Sailfish OS run on their first Jolla phone.

Also permission model on Sailfish was much worse than on Android. I didn't use Android apps on Sailfish, though.

I really liked Silica UI, but available apps had much less functionality than their counterparts on Android and iOS. I think that open sourcing Sailfish and Silica would end up better for them.

Nevertheless, I kinda liked the phone, but ultimately went back to Android.

The Firefox engine legacy goes back to the Maemo times - its not ideal, but what else would you use ? The web engine situation is quite bleak even on desktop Linux distros and its even worse on mobile Linux.

> Correct me if I'm wrong but those cables must include a DAC to function properly and so usually have a tiny kinda crappy one in them, right?

Not necessarily. If the device is using audio over alt-mode, it can use its own DAC.

>those cables must include a DAC to function properly and so usually have a tiny kinda crappy one in them, right?

FWIW, audiophiles were very impressed with the measured performance of the €10 Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter and its DAC. The Google one is likely good too.

They are having phones, with like, cellular communication methods, you know...

> hire DHH as your hypeman, he’ll be able to sell anything to lemmings

Nah, they can have this slogan for free: "Yo, with Jolla YOLO!"

Anyway, I wish Jolla well.

Just turn on the option in signal and convert all the people you chat with signal. Simple.

(Simple != easy ;))

Consumers decided - and Google also decided to ban manufacturers from building phones with another OS or they loose access to Google Play store and Google apps on the lucrative Android phones they also manufacture: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

(the article is from 2013 but was updated in 2018)

So no manufacturer that already builds Android phones will make an alternative OS phone for you - and that's effectively all of the mobile phone manufacturers given Apple makes all of the iOS devices.

The new OS launched in 2013 on production hardware and has a legacy even longer in the Maemo project under Nokia.

Put yourself in their place for a minute. There's a thousand to-dos, including this Bluetooth pass-through feature. If you try to get around to all of them, you need to hire more people, either telling them up front that you won't be able to pay their salary or just not mentioning that until after they've done the work. Or you need to find more paying customers, but you're already trying to do that. Every minute spent on that also is a minute lost on making a better product. How to allocate the available time optimally? It's not as simple as "they're ignoring the community completely".

Saying that this is not a product for you because there's other devices out there without this problem: entirely fair, but that's not the same thing

It was a child of times when stuff like proprietary banking apps were not a thing.

Still, I think the Jolla Phone would make a great second "toy" phone, if you have the budget for a 500€ toy.

yet, every time there’s a “niche” product that people asked for on HN the first comment is almost always about specifications being out of date

How do you assess that? I'd imagine it would be more along the lines of is the phone frictionless to use?

This is just an anecdote but I owned every Google Nexus phone they made up to Nexus 5. A series of bugs caused priceless videos to get ruined and I decided to try iPhone after that. I didn't realize just how much I unconsciously hated using the Nexus phone and that contributed to me not actually adopting smartphone software until I got the iPhone. When the phone and the OS were a burden it led to the phone being avoided. I dont know which was better. I appreciate the battery life, camera and general stability but I hate the new addictions to social media it has caused.

iPhone had the 12 and 13 mini, but they didn't sell, so there was no iPhone 14 mini and hasn't been one since. That was a 5.4" display.

iPhone SE 3 was released in 2022

I know that the specification changed multiple times prior to launch (mostly screen related I think).

This. Some people just don't realize how pervasive and essential WhatsApp is in some countries, mine included.

I'd much rather use Signal but that's not realistic.

They're probably not interested in the Linux power user. They're interested in making their phone viable for everyone else, since that's a much bigger market, and for that customer base, a keyboard is very much going to be a negative and not a positive. The Linux part of their Linux phone also has the same problem, but they apparently have faith in that part.

I feel like you're focusing on the wrong thing from what I said. Jolla is a small company, they don't have the man power to support everything. They already do a lot by supporting devices from vendors that are sympathetic to being open (the Sony open devices program for example).

> And they can, but they decided not to.

They can what, exactly?

It's in a different league as it's a linux phone first and foremost, not degoogled/hardened android, you get full root access as a checkbox in settings that will install terminal app for you to hack to your heart's content, user having root access is not an attack vector for them

No. The touchscreen firmware's source is not distributed[1] for one, and neither is the firmware for the baseband processor. Possibly more aspects.

Although "open" doesn't matter as much as "libre" does. Modifying source code is useless if you can't actually replace the running instance. It has all the same problems as closed source software. Baseband processors are legally required to be tivoized, thus the violation of user freedoms is encoded in law. Quite frankly, I think it's a huge mistake on the part of regulators. If somebody wanted to do undesirable things on cellphone bands, they can simply build their own transciever for it and there's effectively no way to stop that. These regulations aren't a real security measure, not even security through obscurity. Making a transmitter for a certain band is trivial if all you're doing is causing interference. If the malicious actor is doing more than just that, it already requires a strong understanding of RF principles such that they already effectively posses the knowledge to make an appropriate transciever. All regulators effectively do here with Tivoization is protect potential back doors and security vulnerabilities from being mitigated.

[1] - https://docs.puri.sm/Hardware/Librem_5/advanced/firmware.htm...

Which proprietary blobs in Sailfish OS are worse than the others you were referring to?

Small improvements add up.

If GP picked up that 12 again, they’d notice.

"Physical controls" are those that you can physically sense. My point was everyone needs different things, so it's possible to keep core functionality simple and let users add what they need, via extensions. Like dongle hell but better.

This seems like the bigger problem to me the kind of people who are interested in this phone seem like the same kind of people who would be perfectly happy to order it from Europe or Asia.

I don’t think many people who really want this are the kind of people who just walk into a cell phone store and buy whatever tickles their fancy.

Sorry if my post is confusing I'm referring to the poster I replied to mentioning the Pilet which is a raspberry pi based project. Jolla phone I really can't speak too. It sounds closer to graphene where they understand the benefit of reasonable hardware quality and battery life.

The next sentence, which I read as the rest of the thought, was

> They make great pet projects but fail at what most mobile phones do great which is provide a computer I can reliably and safely take with me in life.

And I can't speak to the Librem 5, but the I'd say the pinephone did in fact fail to deliver a reliable daily driver, remaining merely a pet project full of rough edges.

I have Sailfish X on an Xperia 10 III (eg. officially supported Sailfis OS) and I am getting Sailfish OS updates just fine.

As for phone model support - mobile hardware is a mess at low level with most APIs that make PC hardware easy to support by a single OS image (such as ACPI tables) simply missing. Not to mention various hardware bugs that the Android firmwares need to work around or paper ober as well.

As for support contract/subscription, that is I think still a recent idea they are playing with on some newer devices. I actually think its a good idea, as it adds an incentive for the OS vendor to support existing hardware.

Currently it is usually the other way around, where the manufacturer is also the downstream OS vendor that does not get any money past initial purchase and basically wants the device to become unusable as fast as possible, so that you buy another one soon.

My banks have always provided hardware 2FA. I think it used to be free and was surprised that I had to pay for the latest one, but I've had the previous one since my parents paid for everything so idk if that was maybe always the case

I've always done banking from the browser since I got access to any banking at all (probably when I was 16, ~15 years ago). Not sure what I'm supposed to be missing out on with these apps that don't work on many user-controlled devices (be it Linux-based or rooted Android). Log in with chip+pin for my Dutch bank (primary account), and a perplexing combination of high-entropy username, password, 2 randomly asked digits of a 5-digit PIN, a color code that you scan with the hardware device which needs another 5-digit PIN, and then typing over the 8-digit confirmation code. German efficiency! But I barely use that account anyway

Just evaluating my dependency. Was way lower with a small phone than with my 6 inch.

It could be assessed by a study, I have opinions until then.

I cherish my iPhone 12 Mini and treat it with great care as it is the form factor I want and I want it to last as long as possible.

I skipped that one because my SE 2 was less than a year old and I didn't want to go up a size.

Very fair. I skipped it because my SE 2 was still going strong when that came out, which I kind of regret now, since I can't get a new SE 3 anymore.

I remember they had success with a prototype on I think Mobile World Congress, even winning some price. But when they wanted to start manufacturing the screen was EoL and they had to redesign the board for a different screen. This forward pushed the delivery date, resulting in the new manufacturing start coinciding with the funding round failure.

But isn't it a timebomb waiting to blow up eventually? Like, Meta fucks something up with it and there is nothing you can do.

IIRC South Korea used to be fully depedent on a horrendous AcriveX applet running only in Internet Explorer for all their online services, yet they eventually managed to get rid of it. It should be possible here as well.

If they're not interested in that market, they're not doing a good job in showing it. They mentioned "Linux" *five* times on that page, but don't explain what it is. Normal folks don't even know what Linux is, let alone know what the difference between a Linux-based OS like SailfishOS and Android, that would entice them to buy this phone.

It's clear that "Linux" is a big selling factor for this given that they mentioned it so many times, but they do little to elaborate on it.

It's clear who their audience is.

> firmware

You're not wrong, but it's the only phone in the world running an FSF-endorsed OS that has no blobs. We should celebrate and support that and not demand something impossible.

Wife has a 16 pro, I’m on a 13 mini. Other than her phone being way too big I don’t notice any difference.

And why should I? Reading text on the web, calling, sms’ing, listening to music or using navigation does not require “next gen” hardware. Hell, it doesn’t even require current gen hardware. It would probably work just fine on 2000s era hardware.

I mean since it's linux phone with (hopefully) open architecture, it should be possible to create an external usb device that exposes any functionality.

Like, to keep core functionality simple and open it for extensions ("extra battery", "knobs and switches", "ethernet" etc)

It wasnt offered to everyone. They did the whole thing by trickling out information based on batches based on when you ordered. And for the record I wasnt shipped a tablet, given a refund or offered a voucher and based on comments at the time I wasnt the only one. It was a total writeoff.

It was mainly the investors that didn't want to move. Many things were stagnant that needed moving. Now that the investors are gone there is a chance to move things, and slowly things are moving into open sourcing their software.

> but they didn't sell

What do you call "didn't sell" ? In numbers.

They can support passtrough for bluetooth and NFC. It is not something they need to invent themself.

I cant emphasize enought how this feature is of most importance for my daily life. At 48, I am using either the bicycle or public transport for my daily commute (for 30+ years!). I can workaround it by buying a NFC card each month but very typically it is not available without considerate walk time. Not to mention banking app, but I have covered it by reversing and patching it. How many users will do that?

It is not my fault, that the world is as it is. But not supporting real life scenarios is certainly Jollas fault.

I was not asking about having terminal and root access. I was asking about security-wise parity, for example memory protection, full "disk" encryption, permission model, application sandboxing etc. This is the main selling point of GrapheneOS. This and Android application compatibility, but Sailfish OS has its Android compatibility layer too.

Darn well thats a damn shame. The phone compromises so much "nice to have" features to get to the supposed "privacy respecting" label. Its a shame they didn't actually go all the way. Seems like then all we really have in terms of communication devices is the BeTrusted platform (Precursor communication device)

Whole OS?

Sorry to hear that. :( I doubt that it's any consolation that they've gotten better over time on not blundering their fund raisers and pre-orders.

Yes to full disk encryption, and yes to sandboxing.

The Precursor greatly interests me. Do you have personal experience with it?

There are driver blobs for the underlying device which they can't do much about, and then there are the last vestiges of Lipstick (the Sailfish OS UI), which are not released under an open source license. That's hardly "the whole OS", since everything else is a plain linux distribution.

Basically all the middleware in Sailfish OS was always open source and many of the apps as well. They have been also IIRC finally open sourcing the primary apps as there are no longer pesky external investors forcikg them to keep things closed for weird reasons.

But if it does not really cut the power to hardware components, how will you trust that it turns your mic off?

Did you write to them? Perhaps they could have lost your data.

That's nice, thanks for mentioning it. Is there anywhere we can read about this?

How about 3% of sales: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...

As far as I'm aware there's a Patchmanager patch for enabling bluetooth in the Android subsystem. But I don't really understand your vehemence against me, or them for that matter.

Yes, this is what I'm getting at. I want to KNOW that the function is off, and that nothing can turn it back on except a physical action by me.

There are many other use cases, physical control are not used only for cutting power of components.

They answered elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164485

It’s a hell of a lot of phones.

The Open Sourcing? There is more about it on the forum for Sailfish with phase 1, the weather app, notes app and a few other bits:

https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/open-sourcing-proceeding/2468...

Then there is community news category with updates, but it's a bit haphazard and ongoing in this context:

https://forum.sailfishos.org/c/community-news/25

The Camera app, Gallery app, Nexcloud accounts and other accounts components are open sourced and on github. There is now talk about Silica, the Wayland compositor. It hasn't been updated well in recent years and there is talk about moving it to Weston or Wlroots, while also supporting xdg-shell for GTK applications.

In march of that year, but was higher before, no ? Anyway, that's ~ 3 million phones. It's a lot.

I am on Graphene OS now and they will really need to think of something revolutionary to get me back. No, nice GUI is not enough for all the years I have lost, desperately trying to adapt. Now, think of the normal, everyday user, not prepared to even buy a specific phone release for Sailfish. And this is how they will lose users. I consider this as constructive criticism from my side.

Believe me, I am in front row, for wanting the linux to succeed against bastardized OS as android is. But the wrong decisions are just wrong decisions, there is no excuse to it.

This is really nice to finally see this happen! It has been super awkward that often small bugs and messing features persisted for years for the sole reason of the given app being closed source, so the permanently busy Jolla engineers just could not get to fixing it & the community couldn't help withou source & license enabling them to contribute.

It never made sense not opening everything up from the start - did they really thing someone would just clone it and made bank if they themselves usually struggled to make the whole thing work financially.

In my opinion it was most likely the combination of the combination of three things:

1) The race to release the Jolla 1 ASAP back in 2013, resulting in a messy codebase and systems not setup for community to contribute.

2) Then clueless investors got involved, especially when they needed emergency funding after the Jolla Tablet debacle in IIRC ~2015, blocking Jolla from opening the full source.

3) Constant firefighting preventing engineers on actually opening things up and setting things up for people to contribute & actually review the contributions in timely manner.

So good to see things finally improving. :)

I'm making this distinction post-hoc, so I already know how it turned out: they ultimately decided to stop making those smaller devices. I assume that means it wasn't enough sales to be a financially viable product, and to me, selling "enough" would mean that Apple found it profitable to maintain the supply chains and assembly lines for those smaller devices and continued to invest in the product.

Arguing against myself, Apple could be discontinuing the smaller models because they did market research and found that most buyers of smaller, cheaper devices could be converted to buyers of larger, more expensive devices if those smaller devices didn't exist. Auto manufacturers are doing just that, discontinuing or enlarging smaller light trucks in favor of larger models that are subject to less regulation and therefore can be designed and manufactured more cheaply and might offer even more profit.

If Apple has or had that strategy, then my assumptions are flawed because no matter how many mini iPhones they sell, they would still want to get rid of the line as long as most of those customers could be converted to full-size iPhone customers.

The revolutionary part is full linux with root a checkbox in the settings, no need to flash fishy roms, compile graphene yourself etc, it is mostly aimed for linux geeks who like to tinker, if you're fine with android, it's probably not for you (no matter how much they push for it being usable by normal users, there's always fixes/tweaks/workarounds that you'll need to use terminal for, or wait for proper fix, but again full root access is a checkbox in settings that will install terminal for you, for geeks it's the best option out there)

Sure, I am not complaining about that. Again, Sailfish OS is great (!!!!!), no doubt about it. Unfortunately, I need a daily driver instead of carrying 2 phones with me.

Once Jolla will understand that, I am prepared to get back. Until they don't, they will need to find users elsewhere. I can ditch a lot of bloat from my life, but unfortunately, ability to use public transport is not one of them.