Say holla to the Jolla smartphone, landing this month in India exclusively on Snapdeal

India is becoming a breeding ground for smartphone makers. Within the past few months, we’ve seen the re-entry of brands like Motorola, and upstarts such as Oppo and Xiaomi posing a tough competition to heavyweights like Samsung and HTC. Even new brands like Obi are entering the booming Indian market, and just yesterday, Obi has outed its flagship the Octopus S520. Now, another name is being added to the list – Jolla, a smartphone maker from Finland. You might recall that Finland is also home to the iconic brand Nokia, which after being acquired by Microsoft, is seeing a lot of unpleasant changes. But Jolla and Nokia share much more than just their home base though. A majority of Jolla employees are from Nokia itself.

The headlining feature of Jolla smartphone is an intuitive and user-friendly OS called Sailfish. The operating system has its roots in Meego, a Linux-based open-source platform developed by Nokia and other companies like Intel. Unlike competing rivals like the immensely-popular Android and iOS, or the upcoming ones like Firefox and Tizen (yet to arrive on smartphones), Sailfish focuses heavily on gesture-based actions. In fact, the device and the OS do away with any kind of navigation buttons as users can simply swipe on the screen to control operations. Some of the examples of these gestures are double-tapping to wake the display, swiping from the right to return to the previous screen or continue swiping to return to home, swiping from the left to see the next screen in the app, swiping from the bottom to see the unified notification menu, swiping from the top to see more options and so on. The notification menu is slightly similar to Nokia’s Fastlane interface found on the Asha and X series, displaying notifications and feeds from various services at one place. You can also take actions on these without even opening the corresponding app, commenting on a Facebook status for example. Another interesting use-case of this gesture-based mechanism is that they can work in all scenarios, so even if you’re playing a game, you can quickly take a glance at notifications with a simple swipe.

The lockscreen also displays notifications. Instead of confusing you with different apps, the OS has baked-in support for various online services. Messages, for example, gives you the ability to send and receive SMSes as well as Facebook chats. Similarly, the gallery integrates Facebook albums. Another useful feature is that you can change the look and feel of the OS by simply choosing a new image as an Ambience, since it also changes the colour theme and the font of the interface. The OS is very lightweight on resources and hence promises to be very smooth. Developers are also highlighting the true multitasking abilities of the OS since nothing is ever closed and the apps are available on the home screen as live cards or tiles – a video playing in a tiny window for example. Don’t worry, as you can still kill running apps if you want to by long-pressing on the home screen. If you’re worried about the limited number of apps being available for the OS, then the developers have ensured compatibility with Android apps. You can also install the Amazon App Store (even BlackBerry has recently partnered with Amazon for this very purpose) to get the apps directly instead of scouring for APKs. Barring a few exceptions, the OS should ideally support all Android apps.

Coming to the hardware part of the smartphone, Jolla is fitted with a 4.5-inch display featuring a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels. The display also gets a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 2 for protection. Under the hood lies a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC with a clock speed of 1.4GHz. In the memory department, the smartphone offers 1GB of RAM, and 16GB built-in storage that can be further extended up to 64GB. For photography, it sports an 8MP autofocus camera at the back with LED flash, and a 2MP front-facing snapper. The device packs a 2,100mAh Li-ion battery and offers support for the usual connectivity features ranging from 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. Along with the OS, the company is also highlighting the personalisation factor since users can affix different rear panels, available in different hues as optional purchases.

The Jolla smartphone will be available exclusively on Snapdeal within a month. However, the details on its pricing are still awaited. If we take its European pricing into account, then the converted price is around Rs 28,000 which is a tad too much for a smartphone with these specs. The Sailfish OS has definitely piqued our interest though, and we do hope that the device is priced competitively, especially considering the fully-loaded devices with affordable pricing launched recently.