This post originally appeared on my Tumblr.
I’ve been using a Jolla mobile phone since early 2014, not long after it came out. I’m going to be replacing that phone shortly. These are some slightly random thoughts on Jolla and phones in general.
Every phone has its quirks; however, the ones that have developed on my phone have become very annoying. I will end a call, and the network will drop, and I’ll have to restart the phone. The browser frequently closes itself. I will turn on wi-fi tethering, and it will turn on for a moment and then turn itself off. I don’t know whether those are software problems or hardware problems, but they are substantial problems.
The best phone I’ve ever had, for the time it was in, would probably be one of the Nokia Communicators I had. Through most of my undergraduate degree, I had a 9210i. In this, I was (despite having a solid, business-orientated phone) ahead of my peers. People are actually quite happy to carry around large phones, and it’s much more convenient to type lecture and class notes than handwrite them. I did get more than a few odd looks when I opened the phone to reveal a qwerty keyboard and started typing. It was also very solidly built. I then moved to a Nokia E90, the updated version, which was a similarly very useful phone. After several years, I needed to replace it, and went with a very disappointing HTC. I bought it for its qwerty keyboard, but it was too small and too flimsy for me. When the Jolla was being developed, The Other Half was a big selling point; it had the potential for a proper, qwerty keyboard and Jolla was made up of ex-Nokia types. The Other Half wasn’t available yet, but I needed a new phone, and took the plunge.
I also wanted to support people coming from Nokia (as I mention below, a company I had huge fondness for), and to have an alternative to Android and iOS.
What is now known as TOHKBD is sort of available; I considered it, but I didn’t want to buy it through Kickstarter. The person behind the Kickstarter did, it seems, a very good job, but I’d have preferred something OEM and they are, in any case, no longer producing TOHKBD. Relying on your users to develop an ecosystem for The Other Half wasn’t a bad idea, but the pump needed priming. Individuals in their bedrooms were never going to cut it. As it turned out, the only The Other Half options Jolla offered were coloured backs that also gave you a new background. A nice gimmick, but ultimately nothing more than that.
I do really like the gesture-based interface; it is very intuitive, to the extent that I often find myself trying to use Jolla gestures on my Android tablet†. The Jolla team have done a really good job on that. The visual style for the interface is also very appealing. There is a certain cleanness to the whole package that makes Android and iOS feel clumsy even now; when I moved from the Android device I had – a Motorola Razr Maxx, iirc – it felt vastly better.
The battery is a real problem. One of the selling points of the Jolla was that it had a replaceable battery. Apart from one very brief period, there have been no replaceable batteries available. That is really very frustrating indeed. A big reason I’m changing from the Jolla is that the battery life has become very poor; I can unplug it at eight in the morning and, half an hour of internet usage later when I reach university, it will only have sixty per cent of its charge remaining. The last ten per cent runs out in a matter of perhaps half an hour, significantly less than the rest of the battery. I don’t know if it’s a manufacturing problem, something to do with the OS (various updates have improved and worsened battery life), wear and tear, or something else (I was under the impression that the memory effect wasn’t really an issue for for lithium ion batteries). I don’t think that Jolla were acting in bad faith, but it seems that they’re no longer manufacturing the phone, and have set up a separate entity to make handsets. Some acknowledgement that this was a promise left unfulfilled would have been welcome. I mentioned it on the Jolla forums, and received some helpful comments from the community and a ‘this is ridiculous’ from a moderator, which I thought was a bit of a poor show. Apparently, someone had asked the same question some weeks previously.
The design of the handset itself, with the minimal branding and two-layer effect with The Other Half, is still very attractive. I have the Poppy Red cover (as much as anything, so I can find it in my bag!). When it came out, the hardware specification was for a midrange phone; it’s absolutely fine (with the possible exception of the camera). I wonder, though, if it is as robustly built as it might be and whether that has caused some of the problems I mention above.
One of the things I love – really love – about Jolla phone and company is that my handset had almost nothing installed on it when I turned it on for the first time. Phone, browser, messages, tutorial, store, and very little if anything else. There was none of the pernicious, useless bloatware that everyone else seems to go for.* You just installed what you wanted, and didn’t have anything else. That is exactly how it should be done. Jolla also had a range of useful apps on its store, and that number grew. It was never, though, going to match the range available on Google and Apple’s respective stores. Running on Linux, though, meant that Android apps could run on the Jolla. That was a big factor for me; my comment above about wanting an alternative notwithstanding, there’s a lot of great stuff available through Google and Apple. It was very easy, if you wanted, to install the Aptoide app store; it was like installing another programme. It should have been just as easy to install Google Play. I very much doubt that anyone at all will read this, but there seem to be a lot of people in the Jolla community who celebrate the fact that they don’t have to use Google anything. That’s fine; I think it’s great to have that option. There should also be the option to use it if you wanted. It is possible to install Google Play through the command line and I have done so. However, I had to factory reset my phone a while back and, knowing I probably wouldn’t be keeping it, I just couldn’t be bothered, especially as I usually have an Android tablet with me. In theory, you can install things like Google Play Music through Aptoide, but while I can get the programme running, I can’t actually get it to log in.
I do wish Jolla, Sailfish, and Mer well. I might even install the Jolla launcher on a future phone or tablet. For the time being, though, I’m disembarking the little boat‡.
* I very much like my ASUS transformer, but I can’t get rid of some of the preinstalled crap and it bugs me; it is the worst thing about the device.
† While the Jolla tablet looks interesting, I don’t need a new tablet at the moment, would need one with the very good battery life offered by my transformer, and would want one with a keyboard dock. Beyond that, I’d want to wait to see other people’s experiences with it, given my comments above about durability and hardware.
‡ ‘Jolla’ apparently means ‘little boat’ in Finnish.