A closer look at the Jolla phone | Hacker News Reader

A closer look at the Jolla phone

engadget.com

42 pointsGigabyteCoin14 comments

The Jolla UI looks like they borrowed liberally from Blackberry 10 OS. This is a good thing mind you, as I prefer subtle swiping gestures over tapping, and I like being able to 'peek' into my email without opening applications up.

Using the Blackberry 10 OS seems more like a true smartphone experience IMHO. Maybe Jolla felt the same way.

A lot of the gesture stuff predates BB10 and was already in Nokia's N9 MeeGo phone. A little bit about the background:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/meego-diaspora/

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/jolla-sailfish/

The N9 and WebOS were the first that I remember with the swipe gesture based interface, but BB10 is a much better OS than people give it credit for.

Anyone know how the Android app compatibility works? Is it a fork of Google code? Can Jolla be shipped by Android OEMs or will they be banned by Google for violating the secret terms of the OHA like Acer was?

http://www.myriadgroup.com/Press/News-2013/Myriad%20Powers%2...

It's independent from Google code.

Does it mean it's limited to running only pure Java android applications that don't rely on any native extensions?

Seems like BlackBerry 10's Android Runtime had this exact limitation but is now being improved to address this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/25/revealed_how_blackbe...

I wonder how they both compare.

What native extensions? Android native code is just regular ARMv7 (usually) that links into a stripped out libc called bionic. Since both Android and Jolla are Linux there should be no problem with portability.

The big issue for compatibility is in the Google Play libs - Amazon devices have similar problems with maps and that.

I don't know anything about the legal and contractual aspects here (that stuff is mostly secret anyhow), but I would be shocked if they did not use Google's code to do this. To not do so would mean reimplementing Dalvik and all the Android infrastructure libraries. That's a huge, huge amount of code, and it would need to be bug-for-bug compatible with actual Android code. Instead, forking it is far more practical (if still hard).

They licensed solution from company which already did this: Myriad Group.

Thanks, but did what, though - do you know if they reimplemented Dalvik+Android libs from scratch, or are reusing Google code?

Is not an android fork, is derived from maemo/meego, and includes a compatibility layer very much like the BB10 one to sideload android apps.

Yes, I know that, but does the compatibility layer include Google code? Also my question about Android OEMs still stands. Blackberry is not a Android OEM so they are free to ship such phones and Google cannot stop them.

See for more details http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/15/google-wants-better-compa...

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

The best source of information at this time seems to be Youtube videos showing how people download apps from various app stores. One said that it was quite disappointing, that apps were crashing. The one he displayed shut down due to missing Google Play Services. I think this will be the main problem, as Google puts more and more effort in these APIs and less in the general Android ones.

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