Really unlike - state of affairs with the Jolla phone 1.5 years after launch party

 It's roughly 1.5 years after the event in which Jolla launched their Sailfish OS powered phone, and a bit over one year after the first devices were sent out to people who pre-ordered. Now, as I've been using my Jolla for a couple of weeks, I want to write up something - not just to make noise of the company and their product but also hopefully giving some useful points of view for anyone considering buying into Sailfish ecosystem. After all, I did wait for myself, too, although I was waiting for the The Other Half physical keyboard - which I'm now waiting eagerly...

To be honest, Jolla is still a bit a geek-phone, made by geeks, supported by a geek community. I switched from the old'n'trustworthy Nokia E90 and I'm in heaven, but coming from Samsung Android or Apple iOS might be quite different (I've been using Samsung at work for some years now). The basics are there (of course it depends on what is "basic" to any given user), but one might still miss some things. For one, the app market is still small, even though with Android app support there's potentially quite a few apps available. Edit: The most annoying thing about the Android support actually might be that Aptoide and Yandex don't carry the same apps that are available at Google Play, or you might for some other reason get a much older version - I have reddit sync v10 from Google Play for the Android 4.4 phone and got v5 from Aptoide for Jolla (which has Android 4.1).
Of course, one must note that it is a product created by a very small team of people (comparing to the teams working with mobile devices at Google, Samsung and Apple), and it takes some time to get everything built and fine-tuned. Personally, taking everything into account, I think the result has this far been awesome, and if they keep up the same pace at Jolla, this is to become something remarkable.

There are, however. some things that are sub-optimal or downright missing at the moment, for example:

• Android apps can't access low-level device data such as cellular and wi-fi stats, making certain geek apps not working. Edit: Cell ID stuff is missing at least, but then again it is hard to compare since you might not get the same version installed to Jolla.
• Some Android apps also can't seem to access location data, even though at least GPS data is available. This might of course be due to a non-standard way of accessing location data in the app.
• There are many things that cannot be done in the Sailfish UI, but require enabling developer mode and accessing the command line. For me, and the other geeks, this is just fine, but I can't imagine everyone to think the same.
•  The out-of-memory killer is rather trigger happy in the latest Sailfish version (1.1.1.27/Vaarainjärvi), which somewhat nullifies the benefits of multi-tasking.

Some other things I think are pretty remarkable:

• There are many neat things that can be done via the developer mode CLI, like making certain apps start up automatically, customising virtual keyboard layout etc.
• The multitasking really works. A non-geek example of this is that I can have my favourite music playing from Youtube in the background while doing something else on the phone - and even being able to see the live thumbnail of the video on the home screen!
• User interfaces are always subjective to judge, but coming from Android / Samsung TouchWiz I think the UI of Sailfish works at least as well, and it didn't take too long to learn it, in fact I noticed this week I was trying to swipe an app to background on Android :)
• There's pretty good support for also running Android apps if there are no native apps for a purpose. One could possibly even install the whole Google Play stack on Sailfish. Now, I dare you to try the same in any other ecosystem!

One thing to note here is also that unlike the big ones, Jolla does listen to their community and work together to make the product more pleasing. Working communication with a supplier techies (and a good community overall) is something I've learnt to appreciate.

All in all, I think the Jolla phone is a good device, just as long one doesn't have too high expectations to get a sleek and thoroughly finalised device. The potential - in my opinion - is huge, so stay tuned...

Update: (10.1.2014 9:30 GMT+2) added clarifications on the Android support.