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Comment by sirkneeland | Hacker News Reader

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sirkneeland

Obvious caveats:

-it is Jolla's home market of Finland

-Finland is a small market where slight changes in absolute sales volume can show significant changes

-Jolla is satisfying pent-up demand for their phone

-it is on one carrier in Finland (the only one where Jolla is offered)

-iPhone aggregate demand is split into 2 whereas there is only 1 Jolla model

But hey, a win is a win...and it is certainly better than, say, failing to outsell the iPhone on this one carrier in one country

And the Jolla also outsold high-end Nokias (only the low-end Lumia 520 outsold the Jolla)

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True, but I personally can say that I'm very happy to hear this, as I've been hoping for a serious contender besides Android and IOS.

I would like to have a good phone, with a non-dead app ecosystem that is sold to me by a phone vendor as a stand-alone product without a lifestyle template/belief system attached to it.

Until this news, Jolla was an "also ran" in my perception, now they are a prime contender for my next smartphone. (Might also be tempted by an upper-tier Firefox OS phone, if that ever happens.)

Maybe, just maybe, there will come a time when we have a major smartphone company in Europe. I'm all for it.

"Maybe, just maybe, there will come a time when we have a major smartphone company in Europe again. I'm all for it."

(FTFY :) Ericsson pioneered with the R380, Symbian was a decent smartphone OS for its day, and Nokia was Nokia)

I also want Europe to have a major smartphone company, and I say that as an overtly (and possibly overly) patriotic American. Competition and choice are good things. Duopolies are usually not good.

About the Firefox OS, you could just flash a Nexus phone and have it run on that.

"True, but I personally can say that I'm very happy to hear this, as I've been hoping for a serious contender besides Android and IOS."

Give it a couple years. Samsung's the biggest manufacturer of Android devices and they've been working on Tizen[0] to curtail their dependency on Google.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen

I agree, I think we really need someone who will try to make something new and gain small % of the markets so that ios/android will also have to start innovating something cool again. That said, I've personally been burned before by the n900 and N9 which were pretty much "dead on arrival", so I'm a bit reluctant to just buy the Jolla device. Even though the company behind the device is totally different.

I think I'll have to give my iphone5 to my mom and in return take her N9 and install the Sailfish OS to it, just to get the feel of the OS in daily use.

Angry Birds soda for a time was said to outpace Coke & Pepsi in Finland too: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/11/21/rovio-angry-bird...

Jolla is satisfying pent-up demand for their phone

That's the biggest one, IMO. Launch numbers are largely meaningless, let's see how it's doing in two months, let alone six month's time.

The sales number that the article is quoting are for December. I'm not completely sure when Jolla phones started shipping but I think it was early December so this might very well include all the pre-ordered phones.

The phone isn't carrier locked, you can buy it online and then put any SIM inside it.

Also: I expect Apple.fi sells many more iPhones in Finland than Jolla.com sells Jollas.

But it _is_ good that they can boast about this. Unfortunately, they will need all the good press they can get. It will be a hard fight to survive.

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