Jolla on track to ship new phone with Sailfish OS, user-replaceable battery

ChrisArchitect

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216037

rzerowan

This is why i keep saying the Jolla management neds a rethink. Its 2026 GraphenOS is in a partnership with Motorola while Jolla is still doing early 2K style kickstarter campaigns. The market is there , product is loved and ppeople have proved they are willing to take some pain adopting the product.But still the execution to serve that market is shambolic to say the least.

mempko

I used to use a Sony phone with Sailfish but stopped when US shifted to voice over LTE and phones I used were not supported by the networks. If this phone works on US networks, I can't wait to get rid of my Android phone for sailfish. I vibed with Sailfish so hard.

shmerl

What network connectivity does it have for US?

drnick1

They should have collaborated with GrapheneOS like Motorola instead of starting from scratch with Linux and a proprietary user interface. As it stands, this phone will have worse security than a Pixel with Graphene or the upcoming Motorola phone. It's not an improvement over common closed source Android varieties either, and will certainly have worse app compatibility than Android. Hardware switches are irrelevant if you can't trust the software.

poisonborz

Jolla / Sailfish is a 13 year old project and through all this time they couldn't make a foothold, or even sustain some small motivated community around them. During this time: - company folded and changed hand multiple times, including russian ownership - the tablet scandal leaving users with lost funds - closed source parts - locked bootloader - charging a $50 device reset fee - not much change in Sailfish OS since ages - buggy Android compatibility and near zero native devs, all jumped ship At this point I think they are just one of the grifters preying on naive "EU first" supporters shoveling whatever they still have in a new casing. I'd love the idea of a greenfield EU Linux mobile OS, but I don't think it should come from this company.

_imnothere

So many years and they can't(or refuse to?) ship to Asia, ridiculous.

muhehe

I really wish them success, but I just can't see it anymore. I had the first version and it seems it didn't move much forward from that time. And there were also many screwups, as poisonborz reminded a bit earlier. Their UI looked novel, but wasn't that great in practice. It wasn't stable (hopefully that changed) and the lack of real apps was killing it before and now even more, as more banks/govs require some "trusted" apps

joecool1029

Americans/Canadians (and I guess Asians since they won't ship there) don't waste your time reading this, they have a Mediatek SoC and made the choice long ago to not touch these markets. The devices will not carry the band support needed for these markets. Europeans, I guess good luck, have fun. I followed them in the early days and ran early builds of Sailfish on the N9, had high hopes but have long given up on them. EDIT: I will say though I'm still impressed by the libhybris project which went on to make it possible to run linux distros on android SoC's, but the guy who did that for Jolla I think is not with the company anymore for some time.

nottorp

Are these non Google non Apple phones viable any more? Considering you almost can't do banking, and in some places interact with the government, without a locked down phone...

kombine

The absence of eSIM is a deal breaker for me. I need to travel to the US for work and last time I was there I was having a hard time to find a physical SIM for the phone I had then.

notorandit

I would like it to have also hardware video output. Then I could become a PC in our pocket.

elseleigh

I had a SailfishOS phone for four years; an Xperia XA2+. The operating system was wonderful, and being able to run Android apps when there was no alternative was a good way of filling in the gaps in the Jolla store. However, as I've got older I find large phones more and more unwieldy, and I couldn't find a small enough SailfishOS phone to switch to. I'm now running LineageOS on a Jelly Star. The form factor is perfect for me. Would I return to SailfishOS? Absolutely. But there'd need to be a small phone in the line up for me to migrate to.

fractallyte

Regarding the issues of banking apps: if the EU is serious about tech sovereignty, it's up to members to mandate that banks allow their apps to run on Sailfish, or other alternative operating systems. It really is as simple as that. (But whether any EU member is capable of rising to this (very shallow) challenge... well, I'm justifiably cynical.)

written-beyond

Man I really loved MeeGo, I was in my early teens when I got the N9 specifically because it was such a beautiful experiment from Nokia. Amoled display, MeeGo os and the polycarbonate shell. The phone was hot garbage technically, would over heat had 0 apps and had idle battery times worse than a cup of tea left out on a cold day. However the phone was such a work of art I could accept just about any flaw. Right after that I got a Blackberry Z10 and there's just something about the multitasking UI in both of these OSs' that just felt like it was the right way of doing it. Blackberry OS 10 and MeeGo where so wonderful, I truly had a rich experience of mobile phone OSs' growing up. I'm not sure about Jolla as much though. Like I enjoy having this additional option but I wished they digged deeper into features other than enhanced privacy. Not that I'm complaining, I enjoy having enhanced privacy but if they added more productivity features like the Blackberry Hub.

butz

That camera bump, though. Maybe they could've shuffled components in such way, that phone would be overall smaller, but as deep as camera bump, to make whole back flat?

leke

Looks like the Google news has peaked some interest. I'm currently waiting for my Xiaomi account to activate so I can unlock the bootloader and install Ubuntu touch on a Redmi 9.

vrinsd

I used Sailfish OS and so did several of my family members for many years. The "vanilla" Linux OS aspect (besides using rpm) makes it trivial to set up things like dnsmasq-adblocking, firewall rules, etc. Unfortunately, the Sailfish UI itself feels "different for the sake of different" and not because it's functionally more useful. I think the UI is pretty ugly and difficult to navigate. Anyone who "loved" Win8 tiles and/or Windows Mobile flat monochrome UI always praises the SailfishOS UI but outside of that small group I don't think the UI is that functional. It's definitely eschewed it's MeeGo / Nokia N9 UI heritage. What always surprised me about SFOS is despite running on some pretty decent hardware, the UI always felt sluggish, especially given it's kind of reversed-big-text UI paradigm which shouldn't take much work to render. I'm glad there's an alternative, but sad it's hasn't seen a reasonable set of UI improvements despite its age.

r-w

AI slop article with telltale signs of poor writing that no one bothered editing. Better one from El Reg here dating back to last December: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/jolla_sailfish_5_hand... Not sure why this is back in the news again now after almost 3 months, but Wired also has a more recent article here: https://www.wired.com/story/jolla-phone-2026/