Back when Nokia revealed the N9 smartphone, we were pretty excited to have a new operating system to rival iOS and Android in MeeGo. Unfortunately our excitement got put out pretty quickly when Nokia ditched its MeeGo OS in favour of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, along with the N9.
If you remember MeeGo fondly then things might just be looking up, as a group of hard-working ex-Nokia employees have formed a new company and have plans to bring it back from the dead. Jolla is the company name, and its employees have been developing on the old MeeGo build to come out with something new, which we could very well see before the year is out.
The new MeeGo-based operating system is called ‘Sailfish’, and although there’s currently precious few details on it, it’s expected to launch on smartphones and possibly tablet devices. The company, which consists of various ex-Nokia employees, has already put in €10 million of funding to get the project off the ground, and according to The Wall Street Journal, an initial round of fundraising has seen an impressive €200 million added to really kickstart things.
We liked the look of MeeGo and its different approach on the N9 – which was the only phone to ever run the OS, and was effectively repackaged as the Lumia 800 for WP7 – and Jolla reckons its new Sailfish OS will take a similar approach. It’ll be open source to allow developers to add to it, while certain aspects of its user interface will be licensed. CEO Jussi Hurmola says that the main aim is to get manufacturers to adopt the OS for new products, so if Sailfish does well we could see companies like HTC and Samsung launching phones with it.
Most excitingly, Jolla will give us a glimpse at the first Sailfish hardware as soon as next month. We’re not sure exactly what it will be, but it’s speculated that a single smartphone will kick things off. We can’t wait to see what Jolla has come up with.
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