Jolla Phone : First Experiences, Pros and Cons

General
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Two weeks of usage, I think I can provide some very personal opinion as well.

Background: Jolla Phone 2013 user, returning after ~10 years of Android (Fairphone 3)/iOS mixed usage. Linux/Mac user at home.

As mentioned I come from 6 years of Fairphone 3, a pretty lackluster midranger by 2026 standard, so my experience was definitely improved. I am a person of frugal needs.

The good:

  • Good hardware, well built, pretty display
  • Sailfish matured a lot. Smooth UI, snappy, polished, intuitive, responsive all across the board
  • Smooth onboarding thanks to the wizard (Android support installation prompt, account creation, tutorial)
  • Excellent Android apps support so far, including the integration with Sailfish itself (clipboard, content sharing, notifications, URI handling). No broken app for me so far
  • Calendar + mail working 100% with my self-hosted Mailcow instance and Google
  • Gestures: I personally love them. Too bad what was in 2013 a revolutionary feature is now just a given. It was truly groundbreaking. Glad the remorse timers and the pulldown menus are still there
  • Stable, crisp bluetooth audio. Tested with Valco vmk25.2 (must be because both are Finnish products. Just kidding :smile: )
  • Good battery time, it probably can push to two days or more. No solid data at the moment

Overall, it just worked as expected and I was up to speed in little time. It can be my daily driver 100%!

The bad:

  • The Android support is still necessary to the average user due to the sheer amount of apps that work only on iOS or Android. Given the great support, it’s a blessing and a curse. One does not feel compelled to switch to a fully native experience
  • The keyboard is not pleasant to use. This was brought up in a recent meeting and stuff will be eventually addressed, I am sure. Some examples, compared to gboard:
    • no autocorrect
    • no automatic autosuggest (you must pick the word from the top row, else if you type space it just adds the space)
    • spaces when it should not add them (before commas), no spaces where it should (between words)
    • Jolla Phone 2026 - keyboard is too eager to change layout
    • no swiping
  • Certain “essential” native applications are the product of the heroic effort of single developers. Praise to them, they should get more support (OwnKeepass and Microtube come to mind). Suggestion: some crowdsourcing initiative to help them
  • NEW: the browser is pretty barebones. There are alternative browsers and workarounds, though:
    • not many settings unless poking into about:config
    • no extensions support
    • no adblocking (workaround available via harbour-defender)
    • old engine version (this is being updated)
  • The included apps are at times too basic. Let’s say, Sailfish follows more the Gnome philosophy vs the KDE philosophy, if you know what I mean. Examples:
    • swipe-right do delete item in list not available (I assume this conflicts with the OS gestures)
    • alarm clock does not let alarms be individually customized (vibration is dependent on OS setting)
    • media player does not support videos
    • gallery has no directory view
    • generally, not many tunables or settings. Is it bad? Not necessarily. I don’t think the Sailfish GUI bodes well with too many pages and subpages anyway
  • Cameras: I can’t say whether the sensors are good or not as I am no specialist, but there’s definitely room for improvement in the software department. I know work is being done to get the most out of it, so there’s hope. At the moment:
    • Whitebalancing out of the box is poor when outdoors
    • video recording is at times choppy/shaky
  • Haptics: not the crispest, not the worst. I assume the phone still uses the EMR (eccentric mass rotation) vibrator. This leads to some raw, old school feedback. A pity when there are better solutions such as piezo or LRA. As a consequence, I disable haptics (could be me nitpicking, sorry). Anyway the phone body is solid, so no rattling anywhere in the chassis when vibrating.

The ugly:

  • I am happy to say, nothing!

Summary:

Very happy with where Jolla and Sailfish are and how this phone came out, especially in such a short time. Amazing job to everyone at Jolla, the apps developers and to the community for keeping this dream alive.

Most “issues” are due to the software needing some time and love, the hardware is solid and Sailfish is a mature OS. Things can only get better :slight_smile:

A point to raise: Is it good for the average, non tech user? Given the compromises I am afraid no, but that’s no Sailfish/Jolla fault. We’ve got a similar situation in the Linux world: the market share is what it is, and apps are developed for the major platform. Given the price point, what justifies not going for a cheap Android? To me and many, supporting Jolla was a political statement (and I am a nerd), so it was a no brainer. But to the average Joe?
This is another topic and takes nothing from the achievements and value proposition. Worth raising it no matter what.

Anyway, that’s all, sail on!

(I think I’ll make a video review in the coming days)

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