Old Nokia employees start a new company called Jolla, more to come soon!

Posted by in MeeGo, News on Jul 7, 2012 | 6 comments

 

This is exciting. The fine folks from the old MeeGo/Maemo team in Nokia have started a new company called Jolla and are already talking about future products.

Some information.

Jolla Ltd. is a Finland based smartphone company which continues the great work that Nokia started with MeeGo. The Jolla team is formed by directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organisation, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.

Nokia created something wonderful – the world’s best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story.

Together with international investors and partners, Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo’s core engineers and directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo talent to contribute to the next generation smartphone production. – Linkedin

Jolla has 51-200 employees as of today, surprisingly sizable. Company was founded in 2011. I wonder who are these international investors and partners putting their cash in? Making hardware and software isn’t exactly cheap.

 

Then some Tweets from JollaMobile that exploded today.

Jolla is here. ‪#MeeGo‬ based smartphones will have a bright, new future. Stay tuned!

@DicksonBeta @fredericosantos We continue with open source ‪#MeeGo‬, and have additional assets on top to make products.

Though don’t expect Harmattan as that’s of course Nokia’s asset.

Sorry, only Nokia can do images for its products.

Yes, we will produce smartphones.

We are open for collaboration, and friends with cloudberrytec too.

New #MeeGo smartphones will be created together with our industrial and investor partners and with support of the MeeGo community.

How excited am I?

We don’t leak, we will make available material in coming weeks.

New ‪#meego‬ smartphone OS and new products, yes.

About supporting N9 and N950.

We are not in a position to support Nokia’s products.

It’s funny to see whole Twitter explode as Jolla came out of the shadows and started Tweeting. I usually am very skeptical about these small companies producing software and hardware, but here we have some hardcore professionals that know exactly what needs to be done.

Also it’s MeeGo, what not to like? Super excited to see what comes out of this.

Remember to follow JollaMobile on twitter!

Thanks for the overwhelming positive response so far, we are in tears of joy here! Follow us to hear more as we go in coming days and weeks!

 

  • Mr_Robato

    Amazing news! Cannot wait to see what they have planned!!! XD

    • Nokiagadgets

      Same! And looking at what kind of welcome they have gotten on Twitter, we are just tiny part of that mass waiting to see what’s happening here. :D

  • Gasbond

    Fantastic news! It is really amazing ,these guys are really in the right way, can’t wait to see what they can do, our world needs people like them, but when does they wiil start?!

    • Nokiagadgets

      Company was started in 2011 so they have been working on this for some time. 
      Only thing they have said is that they will announce more in coming weeks and months. 

      • Jiipee

         Yes, I checked that the filing was done in April 2011.

        Swipe UI was done in 6-8 months, so they have had time to work on the UX. If Mer is mature enough, they could be in good position since they dont have legacy devices to support. They probably wait at least until Qt5 is ready and launched. Somewhere it was said that Qt5 is already implemented in Mer.

        Also a good deal of the hardware adaptation may have been done already 2010, early 2011. They could use ST Ericsson or something from Intel.

        Squircles they wont get, which is a pity since I like that form factor that tile squares.

        Mr Risku is a bit crazy guy, but he’s also been indicating that some good designer workforce has also left Nokia. Too bad Jolla does not have design professionals as part of the team they have publisized. Ofcourse they can use external resources, but its not the same. I wish that they have competent design people. The N950/E7 for example needs some qualified people to design them.

        • jalyst

          ["Yes, I checked that the filing was done in April 2011.]

          I don’t think they actually started coding until Autumn 11′, that’s what they were saying in their tweets recently.*
          Still, that’s at least 9mth now & you’re right that SwipeUX was started almost from scratch, & done in about 8mths.
          Good point about them not having to worry about legacy devices/code, & targeting Qt5.
          And yes there’s the U8500 that we know was well advanced in the prototyping stage.
          Although I think that was for Maemo6x not MeeGo proper, but hopefully much of the code was shared upstream.

          *Last time I was following them they didn’t provided exact mth/date, but
          Autumn would indicate September, which is also when MeR started IIRC.

          ["Mr Risku is a bit crazy guy".]

          What do you mean by that?

          ["Too bad Jolla does not have design professionals as part of the team they have publisized."]

          Well maybe they haven’t published everyone yet, they’re still actively recruiting people.
          But yes I hope they’ve had at least one very competent design person since the beginning.
          It would be madness if they have not….