Sailfish – a real alternative to iPhone and Android?

No way. The UI is a gimmick. Watch the video.

Seeing him use it does not lead me to believe this will make my life better at all. There are far too many intricate gestures and complex interactions.

This UI does not solve any problems. The interactive tiles that are essentially miniature versions of the full app are just noisy. Part of the beauty of this new mobile experience that recent smartphones have cultivated is modal interaction. One app for one thing. I launch my music app and it's full screen with large touch buttons that are easy to use. I switch to another app to immerse myself in reading or responding to emails.

I never need to do this from my homescreen, let alone see or interact with all of it at once.

The ambient photo stuff is neat but also entirely useless.

Nothing about this is radical. It's just a layer of more playful paint on yet another mobile platform.

Why is everyone so fucking concerned with multitasking?

My android-fanboy buddy showed me something the other day that made me chuckle. He says, "dude, look at this." He proceeded to load a video from the media library, and started to play it in some kind of picture-in-picture mode where it was floating above everything else on the phone. Then he tells me, "how cool is this?! you can use your phone while the video plays." my simple response, to which he had no answer: "when is that useful?" It's not! And he proceeded to admit that, albeit with his tail between his legs. I didn't say that to be an asshole, I just think that these days people are far too excited about gimmicks and useless customizations. He then went on to say something like "well what about if you want to watch a youtube video and also reply to some text messages?" ... society is doomed.

"...a real alternative to iPhone and Android"

There is something about this title that just incites a negative reaction from me. To me, it implies that the current available options are broken beyond repair and that a "savior" is coming to liberate us from them, and boy... do I hate self-proclaimed saviors, especially in the tech area.

Android/iPhone/WP7/Mozilla OS/$xyz are the options we have, and we don't need a real alternative to them anymore than we need anything else. New mobile OS coming up? Great, competition benefits me, the end user, since my devices just keep getting better. But please don't pretend to be something that you are not.

The UI doesn't seem like any radical departure. Even the BB10 UI is probably more radical than that. I do like the fact that it's another open source Linux OS, but for now I'm rooting more for Firefox OS, even though it's yet to be seen if it will perform as well as Mozilla claims on low-end devices.

But I've noticed Firefox OS has given Mozilla a lot of incentives to create new advanced HTML5 API's, and I like that. So the more they can keep up the Firefox OS project alive, the better.

In contrast to others here I actually kind of liked it. I really dug the idea of making app icons interactive and useful, it's an intelligent use of limited real estate.

Also, I'm not sure if it's just novelty or actually more intuitive, but I really liked how the icon grid scrolls vertically rather than horizontally. Maybe it's because of the aspect ratio of mobile screens but it just looked more intuitive to my eye.

They aim to crack China and their reasoning is that the big players haven't got a foothold yet due to being a young-ish market.

At the same time they are looking to developers to create native apps for it and hardly anyone is going to develop for a phone if their primary market is China where 99.9% people steal.

This is off topic, but if your website requires Javascript for me to read a text article, fuck you.

No.

There's a lot of options on the mobile space already (iOS, Android and WM8) - which, IMHO is enough (not to mention BB, FirefoxOS, WebOS, Maemo/Symbian/Whatever-Nokia)...

Even if someone considers this a 'better' UI than iOS or Android (I personally don't), there's no point in switching because as soon as you do, that $200+ you've spent over the last 4 years on apps is gone forever and you'll only get less quality software as their replacement (if they exist). Apple and Android don't just shoot for a 'sexy' look, they create thousands of docs and demos from their SDK for the developers who then create hundreds of thousands of tutorials to help other developers learn quicker. They then spend millions of dollars and millions of hours creating the next big thing. The successes of iOS and Android are not awarded to a design firm, they are given to us.. the developer ecosystem and for that reason, this will never be a real alternative... at least not for a long time.

The UI is pathetic. Why are people so bent on such complex gestures? Scroll up for this, scroll down for that, two finger slide up for another thing. Seriously?

xemacs has a cult following and so will sailfish. But you know how xemacs will do in the "market".

So... the big innovation here is "widgets." Something that android has had for years.

Application of Betteridge’s law of headlines says no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines

It's also not the title of the article (“Here comes the first real alternative to iPhone and Android”), but the premise of the article invites a negative response nonetheless.

1. They have no production as of yet. 2. They have no carrier partners as of yet. 3. They have a retail partner who will sell the phones—if the carriers approve them.

The claim is that the retail partners control the mobile relationship with the carriers in China, but that would greatly surprise me. It's not impossible, but colour me skeptical.

It's also my understanding that Europeans don't necessarily get subsidized phones, either—but they still (nominally) control which phones are allowed on their networks.

It gets worse later in the article where it suggests that the carriers and handset manufacturers are going to have even more freedom to modify the base OS than Android manufacturers do. This alone guarantees that Sailfish will not be a viable platform—you will become as locked into a single manufacturer for any app you buy just like you did with "feature" phones that had BREW or JME games & apps.

The suggestion that Sailfish avoids patent infringement is also laughable: there's so many patents out there that I suspect that absolutely no one can write software that doesn't infringe on something these days. They think that they've avoided patent infringement (just as Google does with WebM), but until someone decides to sue over an alleged patent infringement, no one knows whether Jolla would win.

There's an interesting bit buried in the story, too: they have changed CEOs at least once. The current CEO is Marc Dillon; he attained that post in October when Jussi Hurmola stepped down and became a consultant to the company. Hurmola is supposedly looking after the Sailfish ecosystem. According to what I saw on LinkedIn, Hurmola may have only had the CEO position for as little as eight months, but possibly as much as eighteen (Jolla was founded in March 2011). For a startup with big ambitions, I would want as much stability at the top as possible, personally.

I really think these tile widgets are not useful or easy to understand for an average user.

Apple has it right: iOS is just an app launcher, and there is just one tier of apps, none of this widget-y stuff.

I will note that small read-only changes can be beneficial to the user (calendar shows current day in icon), but I wouldn't dare make someone try and interact with that.

Did they happen to take a look at the phone market in China? They think it's the only way to go, but unfortunately Android got there first. Open source and free. Everything is going Android there, their own app stores too.

Unless they are releasing it for free too then I doubt they will overtake Android in China.

That demo video is terrible. If it really has anything new in it's UI, that guy failed miserably at demonstrating it. Changing the background/ambience is one of the pillars of a "more personal user experience", really?

I'd like to understand why this Quartz guy is jizzing all over this company, but the article doesn't help either.

Is it not possible to implement swipes on Android widgets?

It's meego.

Some day, we'll look back on the days of a mobile OS being announced every few months and chuckle.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-01-13/