Jolla – Half the story

Jolla’s new handset is really only half of the story

• Jolla has released the Jolla Phone with some interesting innovation, but the $520 price tag is going to bring tears to the eyes of many potential buyers.
• The device is a sleek, buttonless touch device with a 4.5inch touch display, dual core processor and an 8MP camera.
• What makes the device interesting are the interchangeable backs.
• At the moment there is just a huge variety of colours and when these are attached to the device, the user interface adapts to match.
• This is a cool, but useless gimmick but it serves to illustrate the possibilities.
• Other features like more storage, NFC, input controls and so on could easily be added into the back and these would then become part of the device.
• This is how a range of different devices could be produced off a single basic platform and it also allows third parties to create their own hardware customisations.
• This idea has been tried before and has never really taken off but opening up hardware development for third parties is something that may just work.
• The user experience is as promised and works smoothly and crisply on the hardware that was launched yesterday.
• Android applications will run on the device thanks to the Alien emulator from Myriad.
• Myriad have been working on this for a long time and I am hopeful that Android apps will work much better for Jolla than they do on BlackBerry’s awful z10 implementation.
• The problem is price.
• At $520, the device is going up against the biggest and the best smartphones in the business.
• Jolla has no brand, no scale, no ecosystem and nothing like the financial clout required to make a dent against the larger players.
• That being said, it does have a relationship with the biggest electronics retailer in China but you can’t force users to buy the phones.
• There is certainly opportunity in developed markets as Android looks very vulnerable but to attack that market, but Jolla needs to rein the price in to be competitive.
• In China it has a good partner but the price is so high that almost all of the foot traffic in the store will have already been priced out.
• The end result is a device that is unlikely to sell in any real volume.
• However, that may not matter as I suspect that the real business for Jolla is in licensing the software to third parties.
• Once the proof of concept has been shown, there could be some interest from handset makers looking to get out from underneath Google’s and Microsoft’s shirt tails.
• The business here would be one like Canonical.
• The platform is free to license but then Jolla would build a version of it to the specification of the customers to take into account their requirements.
• This is a viable proposition and would leave the horrible business of hardware competition to those that are better suited for it.
• This is something that could have a future as I seriously doubt that Jolla is going to make it as a handset maker.