The first Jolla Phone
The Jolla Phone was the first device to ship Sailfish OS, announced in May 2013 and delivered to its first buyers in Helsinki on 27 November 2013, built by a Finnish company formed out of Nokia’s cancelled Linux programme, and it is no longer supported.
Two names attach to the same device. Buyers and the press called it the Jolla Phone; the company itself later used “Jolla 1” to distinguish it from the tablet and from licensed hardware. Both refer to the 4.5in handset sold from late 2013, and the software it introduced, Sailfish OS, is the part of it still running.
What the original Jolla Phone was
The original Jolla Phone was a deliberately mid-range Linux handset whose point was the software, not the specification sheet. It was the first product of Jolla, a company founded in 2011 by staff who left Nokia after the 11 February 2011 decision to standardise on Windows Phone, and it was the first shipping device running an operating system descended from Maemo and MeeGo that Nokia had not built. The interface had no back button, on screen or physical: every navigation gesture came from a swipe inward from a screen edge, and the home screen showed live application covers with two actions attached to each. That design, and the pulley menus that hang from the top of a list, are still recognisable in Sailfish releases more than a decade later.
The hardware Jolla shipped in 2013
The hardware shipped in 2013 was ordinary for its year, which was the intended trade: money went into the platform rather than into a specification race Jolla could not have won.
| Component | Jolla Phone, 2013 |
|---|---|
| Display | 4.5in IPS, 540×960 pixels |
| Processor | Qualcomm Snapdragon 400, dual core at 1.4 GHz |
| Memory | 1 GB RAM |
| Storage | 16 GB, expandable by microSD |
| Rear camera | 8 MP with LED flash |
| Front camera | 2 MP |
| Battery | 2100 mAh, user replaceable |
| Back cover | The Other Half, swappable, with an NFC tag and I2C contacts |
| Software at launch | Sailfish OS 1.0 |
The comparison every early reviewer reached for was The Nokia N900 of November 2009, and the comparison flattered neither device evenly. The Jolla Phone was thinner, faster and had a capacitive screen and a modern radio; the N900 had a hardware keyboard, a full Debian package archive and four years of accumulated community software. Buyers coming from Maemo generally found the Jolla Phone a better phone and a thinner Linux computer.
The Other Half, and what the back cover actually did
The Other Half was the swappable back cover, and it did more than change the colour of the phone. Each cover carried an NFC tag that the device read on contact, so fitting a new one switched the “ambience”, meaning the colour scheme, wallpaper, ringtone and notification sounds, without any user action. Contacts on the inside of the cover exposed an I2C bus, power and interrupt lines, which meant a cover could in principle contain real hardware rather than only an identity tag. The launch covers were plain plastic in four colours; later covers included a wireless charging variant and a keyboard produced as a community and third party effort rather than by Jolla itself.
The idea was more influential than the execution. Very few functional Other Half covers were ever made, and the hardware ecosystem Jolla hoped for did not materialise, but the ambience mechanism survived into later Sailfish releases without the physical cover attached to it.
How the phone was sold before it existed
Selling the phone before it existed was the only way Jolla could fund building it. The company opened a pre-order campaign in May 2013, taking deposits from buyers on the strength of a rendering and a promise, then delivered the first units at a public event in Helsinki on 27 November 2013 to people who had queued for them. Retail sale in Finland ran through the operator DNA, wider European shipping followed during 2014, and from 2015 the phone was sold in India through the online retailer Snapdeal, which was the only significant market Jolla reached outside Europe.
This site is an independent reference and not connected to Jolla. It carries no firmware, no operating system images and no repackaged applications for this device or any other, and it does not quote or track prices, which for a discontinued phone would be worse than useless.
Android applications on a device that was not Android
Android applications ran on the Jolla Phone through a compatibility layer, not through emulation, and this was the single feature that made the device usable as a main phone. The layer was licensed rather than written in-house at first, and it let a large part of the Android catalogue install and run inside Sailfish OS. There was no Google Play Services underneath it, so anything depending on Google’s proprietary framework failed, and Jolla shipped the Yandex.Store in some markets as a way of getting Android packages onto the device at all. The native side had the Jolla Store, whose submissions passed through a review process called Harbour, with OpenRepos.net serving as the community archive for everything Harbour would not accept.
Where support ended
Support ended during the Sailfish OS 3 series, after which the original Jolla Phone stopped receiving new releases. The device had a good run by the standards of a small manufacturer: shipped in November 2013, carried through the 1.x, 2.x and part of the 3.x cycles, and outlasted the Jolla Tablet that was crowdfunded in November 2014 and largely never delivered. What killed it in the end was hardware age rather than abandonment, since 1 GB of RAM and a 2013 Snapdragon cannot carry a modern Android compatibility layer.
A working unit still boots, still runs the last release it received, and is a reasonable thing to keep on a shelf. It is not a phone to rely on: the certificate stores are stale, the Android layer is far behind, and the radio does not support the networks that have replaced the ones it was certified for. Anyone who wants the platform in daily use has to look at current hardware instead.