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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

I backed their tablet and was disappointed when I learned they would never ship it - Jolla's handling of the whole fiasco was very suboptimal.

Pinning hopes on the purism now for a hackable mobile device.

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Jolla had some profitable months last year and started issuing refunds to people who backed its tablet on Indiegogo. The company won't say how many are left, however. "It's not that many," Pienimäki claims. "Some of them are a bit noisy, but it's not really that many anymore." Jolla has promised to issue more refunds every time it has a profitable month. These, Pienimäki hopes, will happen at a "steady pace" by the end of the year. The company, however, is not profitable on a fiscal year basis, and continues to burn through investor cash.

It all sounds grim, and describing people you failed as “s bit noisy” isn’t great PR. It just sounds like people in way over their heads to me.

Keeping money for not delivered product, while spending cash on other parts of the business, sounds like fraud.

That isn't really how it went down, at least as far as I could tell following their updates from the outside.

It seemed more like they ran out of money entirely, and their options were either give up completely and no-one gets anything, or keep working on Sailfish OS to hopefully get new business going, then make a profit in the future that they can use to pay tablet backers back. And they have been paying backers back as promised when they're able to.

I dont look at the situation as charitably. They raised $2,571,262 (479% funded) and spent more than half of it on Sailfish, while running out of funds such that they never shipped the tablets.

The tablets themselves were manufactured by their Chinese partner and even sold on third party Chinese websites. Funders never got their tablets, but other customers were able to buy the same tablets for below what Jolla had sold them.

Jolla was accepting orders until the very end before they decided to come out and cancel the whole tablet effort.

They have since raised over 12M dollars but ostensibly that is not enough to repay the 2.5M they raised initially.

I have no insights into their engineering or technology since I never got to use their product, but as far as business practices go they have constantly scraped the bottom of the barrel.

If you have some spare cycles go check out the comments on the indiegogo page (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jolla-tablet-world-s-firs...)

EDIT - https://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2017/06/financial-news-joll... claims they have raised 70M USD.

"a bit noisy" is still too nice to describe the few people which pollute each an every blog post with the same boring complaints. One shouldn't use Kickstarter when one doesn't understand the risk.

They gave me half a refund, which is honestly more than I expected. I wish them well, but they're not getting any more of my money.

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