Hi all,
i preordered this phone because i want to support a 3rd option for smartphones. First time ever to use sailfishos, so everything is more-or-less comparison to android, especially motorola edge 60 pro which i currently use.
While a list of not-so-good things is quite bigger than the good parts, the phone was a positive surprise. The thing about dust in the selfie camera someone reported is worrying, but lets cross that bridge when we come to it.
First impression are done on wifi-only usage. I didnt put the simcard in the phone since, well, i wanted to test it out first, especially how it works with whatsapp.
For some things in the not-so-good list, i would have opened an issue / bug, but couldnt find online where to do that. Looking at the jolla website, all contacts are either on social networks or this forum, so here i am.
What is written is subjective and not everyone will agree or needs to agree. The post is meant as a feedback with possible improvements which product management can ignore or they can contact me for details if needed.
The post went longer than i initially expected (started with 5 bullets), so if you dont want to read it, here is TLDR:
Currently top 3 pain points for me are:
- gestures (both their design and recognition),
- “browser” not having an adblock and
- missing native messenger apps
The detailed lists of good and not-so-good things are below.
Cheers
The good:
- looks good, very professional. its not rounded, so it reminds me of samsung galaxy s25 ultra aesthetics. even the notch is ok - which i generally dislike (but would be better if it would be punch-through selfie cam for the next phone)
- linux base
- wireguard as a native vpn option, yey!
- privacy slider
- camera shots look quite ok
- white back is awesome, i think the best of all 3
- has a memory card slot, awesome!
- good stuff when pulling app drawer that we can lock it in place - but can this be permanent?
- doesnt come with preinstalled garbage like facebook, microsoft office, etc.
The not so good:
- camera bump is not centred and quite high, so having phone on the table and interacting with it makes it wobble. camera glass/lens is maybe not protected the best, so it is also probably not the best idea to keep it like this and scratch the camera lens. im not sure how to deal with this.
- very bad gesture recognition:
- edge-gesture, while keeping the phone in one hand, the movement is not perfectly perpendicular to the edge, so it often (not always) gets registered as a scroll
- edge-gesture, “overlaps” with back-swipe on a screen, especially weird when you are in a place where your thumb goes from the edge over a control like a button (e.g. somewhere in settings app) - then it doesnt register the “go-to-home” gesture
- while typing, keyboard often interprets fast typing a move-gesture and then this movement changes keyboard - super annoying
- in gallery app, when sliding down to go to “previous view” according to the tip, gestures are also misinterpreting the intention unless its a perfect slide down. if it is slightly off, this gets interpreted as swipe-left/right
- muscle memory is a b*tch, so moving from android with gesture navigation to this phone is rather difficult. this is subjective of course, but first impression is that android designed gestures better. for example the back-gesture. would be good that jolla can support android gestures:
- edge-gesture is “back”, on any screen
- bottom-gesture depends on the screen you are currently on:
- if on home screen, pull up a drawer,
- if not on home screen, go to home screen
- latency on touch: it seems like there is some latency on touch movement (e.g. scroll any screen) vs latency on my current phone. this has an impression of a slow device, but i cant really say if this is really so. didnt measure it.
- animations are too long giving an impression of a slow device. scroll from the bottom to display app drawer (one quick movement so that app drawer goes over whole screen):
- animation has no “stretchy” effect indicating its at the end of the list
- the duration of the animation is quite long - it should be faster (half current duration maybe?). again, this duration gives impression of a slow device. just try comparing it to something like motorola edge 60 pro side-by-side - jolla feels super sluggish → android finishes even the “stretchy” animation way before the upper edge of the app draw on jolla reaches the top.
- browser: you should not advertise that you have it. this is an absolute abomination of an app since it doesnt have an adblock. opening even something like imdb with this is a nightmare. id suggest to talk to ladybird people, they are getting closer to alpha and they are using qt for UI - primary platforms being mac and linux. it should have a fast adblock.
- in the current “browser”, the android back-gesture really comes into focus which makes it rather bad experience.
- i think scrolling latency is even more expressed in the browser than in the rest of the phone
- keyboard languages should be extended to include at least all EU languages
- i didnt find yet (but also didnt really look) how to disable haptics for everything except a pulley
- icons:
- in app drawer are too small for me, you should enable options for the grid and increase the font proportionally (if the grid has 4 items in a row)
- the different icon shape is there just to have a differentiation to android? or is there some other reason? having some common shapes (circle icons, squarcicle or whatever it is called, squares, circle with one part of it being a square - like your media icon etc) would be nice. also having icons like other platforms for some common things (e,g, gray wheel-cog) would help in familiarity. currently, gray wheel cog takes me to LOS/Android settings. following established conventions here would be a good thing.
- store icons are a bit too small, together with font. (and i have increased the font in the system settings). i think taking over some design elements from other established stores would also bring familiarity.
- fingerprint:
- during onboarding, dumb-me was touching the screen looking where is a fingerprint sensor, didnt come to me that in 2026 you would have it on the power button. you should make an arrow pointing to the side where to touch.
- while phone is in sleep mode and screen is off, touching a power button opens up the unlock screen, so i need a second touch to unlock it. id expect when i touch it it unlocks immediately even from sleep.
- apps - while i am aware that you are counting on android apps to fill the starting app gap, and android apps obviously work here, i find that they still stick out due to navigation e.g. back button at the bottom while using whatsapp. having said that, the following is about native applications:
- no major messaging apps on the platform. id think you should talk to people from signal (they already have a qt app on linux), whatsapp and maybe a third option to support your platform. maybe jolla could, in cooperation with signal, make a native app.
- no maps/navigation (this could have been delivered by jolla the same way organic maps work on android)
- every time i open camera app, i get the same “tip” that scrolling down brings options
- when writing a note, a keyboard normally pops up. but, i would expect to be able to hide it so i can see bigger portion of the note. on android you can use edge-gesture to “go back” to the state before the keyboard was shown, but here once it is there, you cannot hide it again?
- microsoft crap like exchange comes embedded, right? is there a way to remove it?
- once android runtime is installed, can it be removed? purged? without the phone reset?
- the home screen with tiles/cards of running application should have an icon indicator. some cards look really similar and i am kind of visual person, so i recognise most of it by color/icon. for example settings app card has cogwheels, but its very similar in distribution of colors and shapes to jolla store card. not to mention that jolla store card has a circle at the mid bottom, which gives the impression of a loupe/magnifying glass, so i always think “search” first.
- locking of the phone - as soon as the picture disappears immediately locks the phone, touching the screen or something should bring it back without the unlock during 3s after the picture is gone.
- settings app: why do you even have tabs [apps, settings, accounts]? why arent apps and accounts simply entries in the settings menu?
- tabs also somehow interferes with jolla back-gesture (swipe left-to-right).