Lately I was travelling in Tampere (Jolla’s hometown in Finland) and surroundings. Finnish summer was showing its kinder cheek to me and I enjoyed exploring waterways on my SUP board.
Finland is famous for its thousands of lakes, and there are about 188000 lakes here. If you’ve been with Jolla’s journey from the beginning, you’ll know that early OS releases were named after Finnish lakes: Releases | Sailfish OS Documentation.
Above photo portrays not only one of our lakes but was also taken on an island and those we have even more, about 225000 of them. So a clear win for the islands. Possible naming scheme in the future(?)
Photo was taken with my new Jolla Phone. Pictures are already looking nice if you happen to get a good white balance to the photo and avoid getting sky to turn into a cyan overblown with highlights. Jolla has said that they’ll fine tune still the camera, surely getting better with upcoming releases. Even now it is hands down the best camera experience I’ve ever had on a Sailfish phone.
Cola, coffee and candies
I reached out to Jolla to talk about payment apps, and to my huge surprise they invited me to visit their Tampere office. I figured they would be too busy handling orders and customer support. Yet, they still made time to sit down and chat with me.
Sami, Raine and Harri welcomed me with coffee/cola and dangerously good candies. Couldn’t stop eating them and I hope Jolla doesn’t go bankrupt because of my snacking.
New Jolla Phone
We were discussing in general about the Jolla Phone’s launch, deliveries, community forum and how to make newcomers feel welcome. The apps unfortunately play a gigantic role here as we all know. Sami wanted to lift up a site in this this regard:
http://sailfishos.app/ (a community project - not affiliated with Jolla)
Jolla would like to see more input of users there.
By the way, I’m thinking about making a “hands on, detailed onboarding instructions - my way”. Then a newcomer can follow it and copy those parts that suit them. But we shall see when I’d have time for such an effort. Would need maybe revert to factory settings and write it that way - otherwise impossible to remember everything…
Payment/Banking apps
Let’s be honest. Banking apps are a major hurdle for the Sailfish. And there is no easy nor extensive one solution for it. We will need to approach it on multiple fronts. This would be the nicest thing to see on screen on a native app (or without an app for that matter):
Further discussing about payment apps while me and Sami were getting ourselves drunk on candy. Raine and Harri have better immunity against that sweet nectar, it seems.
However, Jolla is very well aware about the problem with payment apps. Sami shed some light that there would be talks with few European actors on this matter during autumn. And I wish them success with the talks!
Payment Apps Work Group
To complement Jolla’s efforts on payment/banking apps - community effort is being gathered in a form of a work group. Although I myself don’t have much knowledge I wanted to at least coordinate this further. So, we are going to have a kick-off for a work group called “Sailfish Payment Apps Work Group - Europe” during late August.
Already now there is a group chat for the group here in this forum. If you happen to have contacts into the banking world, can make code on Android/AAS/Sailfish, and feel also that something needs to be done - don’t hesitate to post your reply on the thread saying that you want to join:
As we speak there is an active member in the group who has already initiated a “SailWero” project for implementing native connection for Wero paying app. Simultaneously the “digital euro” is coming slowly but steadily. There are quite interesting things coming on the horizon.
Sami (half-?)promised that there can be a Jolla employee as a contact person for Jolla’s behalf and I hope we could get the Work Group as a representant on Sailfish’s behalf so that banking companies would actually listen to the Work Group. We’ll see how it proceeds.
When it was time to say good bye, we took still a photo (with my Jolla Phone) next to Giga Jolla (which will get a Giga-sister with all OS functions and swipes - that would be a real road show people magnet!).
While leaving I snapped a bunch of those “The European smartphone” -fliers. I’m planning to strategically place these on hotel lobbies, libraries and gas stations and such where random by-passers will see them - somebody might get interested or knows someone else who is interested.
This photo also with Jolla Phone.
Thank you for reading (sorry about a lot of unnecessary information and spam you needed to read to get through the whole post). Have a nice day 
These are “Reino” shoes, very cozy and also very popular in Finland 
