Jolla Announces Their First Phone

[89c51]

As for CPU power, I need enough to make browsing the net smooth. Anything beyond that is waste of money/not interested.

Speaking of which. What browser are they using.

There was a FF qt port but i don't think it is being developed anymore.

[Fenrin]

Speaking of which. What browser are they using.

There was a FF qt port but i don't think it is being developed anymore.

looks like they will use Opera Mobile:
http://www.jollausers.com/2013/03/sa...-using-webkit/

IMHO nothing is wrong if they choose Opera, especially if Operas developer makes their new Webkit based browser fully OSS.

[carewolf]

hmm wasnt jolla suppose to be open source or something like that ?

Yes, don't feed the troll, or at least stop taking him serious.

[Serge]

It is very desireable to have a phone that is capable of handling desktop computing workloads. Because, you know, that's the point where you plug your phone into a dock with a 21" display and full-sized keyboard, and throw away the desktop or laptop you were using and never look back.

Which is also why we need a mobile OS that offers us the control and choice that PC OS'es do. I, for one, do not want to be locked into my <insert mobile platform name here> when I buy a device. I'll pay extra for a device where swapping out any part of the OS is easy and is a supported practice, even if that device initially comes with a proprietary UI layer.

So, unless I'm really dense, that's what it sounds like Jolla is trying to accomplish. It would be better if there was no ambiguity about what will and what won't be open source in their stack, but it still sounds like a step in the right direction to me. Am I wrong?

[GreatEmerald]

I, for one, don't see plugging a phone into a dock ever replacing my desktop. After all, it takes away the interesting challenge of building a system yourself.

[dee.]

It is very desireable to have a phone that is capable of handling desktop computing workloads. Because, you know, that's the point where you plug your phone into a dock with a 21" display and full-sized keyboard, and throw away the desktop or laptop you were using and never look back.

One thing I always wonder is, if you have a dock, that already has a big screen + keyboard, then why not put a cpu in that dock? Why require a phone? You can already attach a phone to a computer via usb or bluetooth, effectively giving you every advantage you could possibly get from docking... so: why would we want to dock?

[Cyber Killer]

You can accelerate image manipulation with GPGPU or similar, but not all manipulations are equally suited for that.
Video transcode is possible with dedicated hardware, but postprocessing is mostly not. I admit that it can be done in GPU shaders to some degree. Audio postprocessing on the GPU is at least not widespread yet I think
You typically have more applications open on a desktop than on a mobile phone, so more cores (and indeed more RAM too) help.
If you want to capture a video and automatically send the YouTube link to all of your friends which appear therein, then individual cores can start looking for recognizable faces at every I-frame.

Do you know that you do not need multiple CPU cores for normal multitasking? :-) You can just as well open/load 10 browser tabs on 1cpu as on 10cpus. What's more, the tasks are prioritized so the active tab isn't slowed down by the other ones that are opened in the background. And even more... any modern OS uses ~100 processes constantly, but somehow you don't need to have a 100 core cpu, all this is already done and works cool.

[Adarion]

I, for one, don't see plugging a phone into a dock ever replacing my desktop. After all, it takes away the interesting challenge of building a system yourself.

Not only that, customizing a hardware to your needs. It's also that with a real desktop you can still exchange, upgrade, repair things much better than in a tiny all SMD-soldered multilayer-PCB cellphone. All the modularity is missing.
For a cellphone I think most important is battery runtime, cause what's all the speed worth if it ends after half an hour?

[Cyborg16]

One thing I always wonder is, if you have a dock, that already has a big screen + keyboard, then why not put a cpu in that dock? Why require a phone? You can already attach a phone to a computer via usb or bluetooth, effectively giving you every advantage you could possibly get from docking... so: why would we want to dock?

One word: data.

But to be honest if you want to take your data with you, there are better options. Buy a 2.5" SSD; it's lighter than a phone and there are fast-swap bays to go in a 3.5" floppy bay and you can also put a hard drive into a thinkpad ultrabay with minimal fuss.

Back on topic, if these are the guys behind the awesome N9 UI, I can't wait to see what this phone's like to use. Plus Android app support is cool (though that was promised for the N9 IIRC).

[a user]

LOL ubuntu and super computers? I haven't seen Ubuntu anywhere near a super-computer...

i did and it is doing very well (of course configured for it). why not? it is as good as any other linux for it. you have to configure them all. some distros already bring cluster software etc. on default install. but where is the problem to install it later?