tpoacher
a year ago
I used to own a Jolla phone, and there was something magical about it. At the time, their ideas and execution were a breath of fresh air, and the experience was amazing even despite some unavoidable teething problems. I happily used it as my daily driver for about 2 years, proudly showing it off to friends at every opportunity, and not wanting to switch to another phone.
Now, as such things go, many of the unique ideas dreamt up by Sailfish have been absorbed into the major OSs (which will no doubt claim they innovated them themselves), and Jolla had to close because competing at both the software and the hardware model simultaneously turned out to be unsustainable for them. And my own Jolla phone developed a hardware fault and that was that.
So I reluctantly switched back to Android. But none of the mainstream OSs managed to quite capture that magic, even despite having now copied most of its features. And when I tried the latest version of Sailfish on a Pinephone about a year ago, it too no longer felt like it had that sleekness I had come to love on the Jolla.
CRConrad
a year ago
> I used to own a Jolla phone, and there was something magical about it.
I did too, and I more or less hated it. The whole UI was impossible-to-remember gestures and swipes this way and that. Pretty much like iOS, but even worse. (Even Android has been going that way since then. Can't tell for sure when its usability peaked; sometime between 2013 and 2018?)
tpoacher
a year ago
I found the vision behind gestures very intuitive.
The main idea you had to understand was that you have 'edge' gestures, and 'inner' gestures. 'Edge' gestures relate to functionality that has to do with the phone as a whole and are available at all times, and 'inner' gestures relate to functionality that has to do with the specific app currently in use, and if any actions are available they will be clearly signposted in the app. And the apps were explicitly designed with this interface in mind.
I thought the onboarding tutorial was very clear, and the learning curve to start using the phone effectively was negligible once the above 'phone vs app gestures' was understood.
By contrast, Android has attempted to copy these gestures, but they are severely lacking with no unifying theme in my view (I cannot speak for iPhones since I do not own one, but from my limited interaction with them they don't seem any better, and when I used relative's iPads, my personal response was that the gestures effectively needed to be 'learned' and really didn't make intuitive sense to me).
Effectively android doesn't quite make the distinction clear between 'edge vs inner' or 'phone vs app' gestures, and it comes down to the user (and/or app developer) to figure out what works where by trial and error; the horizontal swipe from the edge constitutes a 'back' button (but only if you keep it 'pressed'), the vertical constitutes a 'apps list' button (but only if you keep it 'pressed'), and a vertical swipe without keeping it pressed acts as a 'home' button. The only thing they've kept from Sailfish is the top-to-bottom edge swipe showing you notifications. But it shows that effectively instead of making gestures a first class citizen, they've just said "how can we add gestures that act as buttons", but it's still a button-centric experience rather than a genuinely intuitive gesture-based UX.
As a result, most people I know tend to turn these off and use the software buttons instead, despite the slighty cost of screen real-estate. I've chosen to keep them on, but whenever I hand my phone over to my wife, the first thing she asks is if I can enable buttons so that she can do what she wants to effectively.
CRConrad
a year ago
> I found the vision behind gestures very intuitive.
Two things:
1) Only goes to show that "intuitive" isn't the same for everyone. (Stands to reason; neither is intuition.)
2) Look at the length of your post. Anything that needs that much explanation can hardly be called "intuitive".
I didn't know we're married, but it seems I'm your wife. ;-)
brylie
a year ago
tpoacher
a year ago
Jolla, as opposed to Sailfish itself, was all about the physical phone, running Sailfish OS.
At some point they became a 'consultancy' company, effectively using Sailfish OS on devices or whatnot, but without bespoke hardware. There were a very small number of devices that more or less supported Sailfish.
I was surprised to see they have now restarted their hardware attempts, with a limited batch of specially ordered "reference implementation" devices, made by a partner in Turkey.
I might have been tempted to order one if the campaign hadn't ended already. But, having said that, I don't have much faith in such 'limited batch campaigns' anymore. Having a phone whose entire ecosystem is at risk of completely expiring after a couple of years isn't fun anymore; even if it's still a linux phone in theory.
gbraad
a year ago
they had to reorganize/laid off a large amount of personnel