Saturday, 15 February 2014
The Jolla, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a smartphone from a team of ex-Nokia employees. It’s pronounced yol-la, and the device runs on a 'new' operating system called Sailfish. We say that because Sailfish is based on another mobile OS called MeeGo.MeeGo was owned by Nokia but got ditched in favour of Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. The last MeeGo device was the Nokia N9 smartphone which never launched in the UK.MeeGo is an open source project, so the ex-Nokia employees used it to make Sailfish.The Jolla’s design is quite unlike any other smartphone we’ve seen. The two-tone black and white case makes the Jolla look a little like Sony's Xperia devices.
It has a two-piece construction with the front section being rounded at the top and bottom, and the back piece having rounded sides. The sides which aren’t rounded are square, resulting in a slab that’s not as comfortable to hold as other smartphones. It's a little chunky at 9.9mm and a middling weight of 141g.The rear piece is a cover which unclips to reveal a removable battery, micro-SIM card slot and microSD card slot.The removable covers, which come in a number of different colours, each have an NFC chip which stores information. When attached to the phone, the case dictates the wallpaper, custom tones and other settings.jolla smartphone :Hardware and performanceThe Jolla is powered by a 1.4GHz dual-core processor made by Qualcomm and 1GB of RAM. There's 16GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot underneath the rear cover for adding more, so we’ve no quibbles there. A 7.98Wh battery is removable and we've found
performance to be of a good standard. The Jolla has lasted a couple of days fairly comfortably and didn't drop much in percentage overnight.The rest of the specifications are towards the top end of the mid-range with a 4.5in IPS screen which has a qHD resolution (540x960). Colour saturation is good, giving the display an eye-popping look without slipping into garish territory.Unfortunately contrast isn't its forte, and the viewing angles aren't up to the normal IPS standard we're used to. There seems to be certain sweet spots where the display looks fine but at angles in between these, everything goes a bit dim and contrast drops off.You get the usual Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS, plus 4G support which you'd expect to find on a modern smartphone (the Moto G is stuck at 3G speeds, for comparison). It's also got NFC, but this is only there for use with the Jolla's interchangeable covers (see design and build).Jolla smartphone: CamerasThere's an 8Mp rear camera with an LED flash and a 2Mp front-facing webcam. Those numbers sound reasonable enough, but as we've said time and again, they're no guarantee of quality.
