First look at the new Jolla tablet (video)

6 Mar 2015

If there was a company worth watching at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona it was Jolla, the start-up led by ex-Nokia workers who plan to turn their Sailfish OS into the world’s third biggest operating system.

The story goes that back in 2011 a bunch of Nokia workers were annoyed that the unthinkable was going to happen, that Nokia would bend and take on Windows Phone as its primary OS.

The pride these workers had in Nokia’s legacy, their belief in open source and what they had achieved was evident in their decision to build their own crowdsourced operating system called Sailfish OS.

Their enmity towards Microsoft is clear in their ambition to usurp Windows and become the third biggest operating system in the world after Android and iOS.

They absconded from Nokia just before it was acquired by Microsoft and the fruits of their labour – a smartphone and a tablet computer – were on show at Mobile World Congress 2015.

The Jolla tablet is powered by Intel’s innovation platform and includes a quad-core Intel processor, has 2GB of RAM and comes in either 32GB or 64GB versions.

The screen is 330 pixels per inch and designed to match the resolution of the iPad Mini 3.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com