Jolla reveals Meego based Sailfish OS for the first time

Just as expected, at the Slush conference in Finland today, Jolla has introduced its Meego-powered Sailfish OS for the very first time. The new mobile operating system will be open-source, and will be designed for use in various kinds of devices like smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.

Not much has been explained about the OS itself, but at least the company has taken the time to put a short video together, highlighting some of the key concepts of the platform. According to Jolla, one of the main virtues of Sailfish will be the seamless multitasking between truly running apps, the ability to interact with mini versions of the apps directly from the homescreen (kind of like widgets), as well as effortless personalization.

The SDK of the new platform is now available and can be found using the appropriate link below. Apparently, Jolla intends to manage Sailfish as an open-source project, hoping to form a community of developers who would participate in the development of the OS.

Jolla has used the occasion to announce that its open to collaboration with many different chipset vendors, with ST Ericsson’s NovaThor SoC already supporting Sailfish. This actually comes to suggest that the first Sailfish devices may be designed to hit more affordable price-points. Unfortunately, there’s still no information when the first devices using the operating system might hit the market.

“We warmly welcome ST-Ericsson onboard. It is great that this industry leader is partnering with us and Sailfish. ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor platform combined with Sailfish OS will enable vendors to bring highly competitive mobile products to the market. We welcome other players in the mobile industry to join and contribute to this game changing movement. We also target to announce other chipset provider partnerships soon.” - Marc Dillon, CEO of Jolla.

You can find some more details in the press release below!

source: Jolla, SDK

Press Release

Sailfish advances – Sailfish OS, with SDK and UI introduced

Helsinki,

Finland – Today at the Slush start-up event Jolla and Sailfish take

significant steps forward and bring Sailfish Software Development Kit

(SDK) for the community and showcases it effortless and innovative User

Interface (UI) for the first time.

Sailfish OS already supports

multiple chipset technologies that are being demonstrated today in

Slush, and further support is continuously being built for all the major

chipsets. Today Jolla is happy to announce that ST-Ericsson is ready to

support Sailfish OS in its NovaThor platforms.

“We are pleased

to add Sailfish OS to the mobile operating systems supported on our

NovaThor ModAp platforms. Supporting Sailfish from its inception shows

how flexibly ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor platforms can adapt to different

mobile OS’es and we look forward to seeing Sailfish powered devices in

the market next year,” said Peter Oaklander, Senior Vice President for

Sales & Marketing, ST-Ericsson.

“We warmly welcome

ST-Ericsson onboard. It is great that this industry leader is partnering

with us and Sailfish. ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor platform combined with

Sailfish OS will enable vendors to bring highly competitive mobile

products to the market. We welcome other players in the mobile industry

to join and contribute to this game changing movement. We also target to

announce other chipset provider partnerships soon,” said Marc Dillon,

CEO of Jolla.

Sailfish Alliance is first and foremost a movement

that will unite OEM and ODM manufacturers, chipset providers, operators,

application developers and retailers. The key target is to bring

innovation to a stagnating market and help mobile industry players to

stay on the bleeding edge of the mobile OS development.

Sailfish SDK preview introduced to facilitate community work and application development

The

Sailfish OS and UI are highly adaptable and will support smartphones,

tablets, smart TVs, automotive and other device classes. Sailfish is a

real opportunity for developers to participate in and build solutions

with existing open source projects such as Qt, Mer Core, and the Linux

kernel. The new OS will be built through community involvement and

participation.

The Sailfish SDK consists of Mer Core’s tools, Qt

Creator, Jolla UI components, Sailfish UI framework and Sailfish handset

application interfaces. The SDK encourages Sailfish friends to extend

the tools to support development for their company’s style. The SDK is

the right choice for Sailfish Alliance partners for both contributing to

the direction of the operating system and developing new and magical

products.

The SDK is available and developed at www.sailfishos.org.

Fastest Use

The

Sailfish user interface, shown for the first time at Slush, has been

designed with the most recent consumer needs in mind. With the most

modern mobile UI Sailfish provides effortless multitasking.

Users

are able to multitask instantly between truly running applications.

Even more, users are able to interact with the running applications

directly on the home view: ending a call, pausing a song – without

needing to enter the application. This multitasking feature brings

usability and speed-of-use to a totally new level, unseen in the mobile

industry.

The UI features other innovations, the Pulley Menu

enabling fast and effortless interaction; at-a-glance peeks at status

information; effortless personalization of the device to match the

user’s style and mood.

For the UI demo, please visit http://www.youtube.com/user/jollaofficial.

Jolla reveals Meego based Sailfish OS for the first time