Jolla, the Finnish MeeGo startup composed of ex-Nokians building their own mobile hardware and Sailfish OS, has finally taken the wraps off its first handset, revealing what the hardware will look like on its website. The design is a clean-looking, elegant slab, with the most stand-out feature being the coloured shell on the back that wraps around half the sides of the phone to create a dual-tone sandwich effect.
The shell colours, which appear to be user-customisable, can also influence the theme colours of the Sailfish UI. This is a feature Jolla is calling “the Other Half”. “Attach the Other Half and your Jolla becomes alive and unique,” the text notes. “Magically, the software changes to match your selected colour and design. Your Ambience. Your Jolla.” It’s unclear exactly what technology is linking hardware and software but it sounds like it could be NFC.
The removable, customisable shells bring to mind Nokia’s Lumia 820 — a device for which Nokia has released the 3D print files so owners of 3D printers can design and print their own custom shell. The Lumia 820 shells, however, do not have any link to the Windows Phone software.
Jolla’s handset will cost €399 ($513) and is slated to ship at the end of the year. Jolla notes:
Expected availability by end of 2013 subject to demand in your local market. Sales will start in European countries with more countries to follow. If you join the Movement and get the pre-order number to buy the phone when available, you’ll pay no more than 399€; including applicable VAT in Europe, but excluding shipping costs, duties and any local taxes.
Specs wise, the device has a 4.5″ Estrade display, a dual-core chip, 4G, 16GB internal memory plus a microSD card slot, an 8MP auto focus camera, a user-replaceable battery. The device is powered by Jolla’s Sailfish OS but can also run Android apps, giving it something of a leg up. Jolla is also encouraging developers to build native Sailfish apps too.
The hardware reveal is also the start of Jolla’s pre-order sales campaign, announced last month. Jolla confirmed it is taking pre-orders from today, with the first shipments due at the start of Q4 2013. It is accepting pre-orders of either €100 or €40 for a limited edition Jolla (plus exclusive Other Half for those making the higher payment). It is also accepting pre-orders without any down payment to be among the first to get a Jolla handset.
The big question for Jolla is has it done enough to sustain people’s interest in a device that won’t ship for at least half a year — during which time scores more Android-powered handsets will arrive, and companies like Samsung will continue to push the limits of flagship phone hardware.
Jolla is holding an event in Helsinki today — dubbed the Jolla LoveDay — to promote the handset and encourage fans to pre-order the device, having kept the design tightly under wraps up to now.
An upcoming update will bring a web browser, email and update store app to Barnes & Noble’s super affordable Nook Simple Touch line of e-readers, which will begin rolling out June 1 according to a source close to the matter who wishes to remain anonymous. The 1.5.0 update was created in response to the positive critical and customer response to the recent Nook tablet update that brought Google Play to B&N’s Android-powered devices.
The Nook Simple Touch and Simple Touch with Glowlight will be receiving the over-the-air update starting next month, marking the first time that Nook’s entry-level readers get official access to web browsing capabilities. Amazon’s competing Kindle devices have shipped with an “experimental” web browser since the Kindle 2, but have not offered an email client on anything except for the Kindle Fire tablets.
When B&N announced that Google Play would be coming to Nook tablets, I praised the decision as a key step in helping the company position them as affordable, fully featured Android tablets, as opposed to just glorified e-readers that could do a bit more than most. The Nook Simple Touch is still pretty focused on e-books, but as an email triage device and basic browser, especially for text heavy content, it probably becomes a lot more attractive to an audience that mostly wants books but would like a little more general-use value as well. Especially for older buyers, I imagine a simplified device with a cheap price tag has the potential to carry appeal over a much more expensive full-fledged tablet.
Will a browser and email client be enough to right the Nook ship? Probably not on their own, but B&N is at least expending effort in the right direction to combat flagging consumer interest in dedicated e-reader devices.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the rumored $1.1 billion cash acquisition deal for social blogging site Tumblr has been approved by Yahoo’s board of directors. The Tumblr acquisition was rumored last week, with a price tag reportedly north of $1 billion, which appears to be accurate if the WSJ’s sources are correct.
Tumblr would continue to be run as a separate business and independent property, the WSJ’s sources said, and we could see an official announcement as soon as Monday from one or both of the companies. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer become interested in the site only a couple months ago, but sees the Tumblr purchase as a way to big inroads into social media and boost revenue growth, according to one of the anonymous people who spoke to the WSJ. Yahoo already has an event scheduled for Monday in NYC, and the WSJ has learned it will deal with Flickr, something which we’ve also heard separately. The Tumblr deal might not have been on the docket initially, but if it’s all approved it’s highly likely we’ll see it mentioned tomorrow, too.
Recently, we’ve seen suggestions that there’s a vacuum developing at the top of Yahoo’s executive ladder, and there have been rumors recently of key people departing from the mobile team. It’s interesting that a lot of these departures are fairly recent, and could go some way to explaining why Tumblr may have been willing to accept the $1.1 billion offer when sources have told TechCrunch that the amount was seen as “too low” by some within the company. Our sources also suggested that Tumblr may be looking at a fast-depleting cash pile, which again gives it good reason to sell.
Some users on Twitter are threatening to depart Tumblr if the Yahoo deal goes through, as Ingrid reported on Saturday. Overall, as she noted, visitor growth to the site appears to be flat or declining slightly in 2013, so combined, those two facts might not bode well for Tumblr’s future user acquisition. But Instagram also faced an outcry of vocal users claiming they were going to shut down their accounts and depart the service for good when Facebook bought that company. In fact, users, engagement and reach for brands using Instagram have all gone up considerably since the acquisition.
Yahoo has been snapping up companies at a rapid pace this year, with what seems like new acquisitions every week over the past few months. One of the more high-profile purchases was the Summly buy, which brought the news summary startup into the Yahoo fold for a reported price of around $30 million. The company’s 17-year old founder arguably made more headlines than the company itself, and many debated the merits of the acquisition.
More recently, the companies on Yahoo’s shopping list have been more under the radar, and in general the pattern looks like a strategic hiring spree, rather than a bunch of additions to Yahoo’s product portfolio. Tumblr would likely buck this trend, as it has a massive built-in audience, a full-featured, mature product and targets a relatively young demographic that so far isn’t all that well-represented at Yahoo. There’s a certain amount of “cool” that’s attached to Tumblr, and Yahoo is desperate for exactly that.
The deal size is raising some eyebrows, since, as Fortune’s Dan Primack tweeted, Yahoo had only $1.2 billion cash on hand as of its most recent quarterly earnings, which makes an all-cash offer for Tumblr a lot more of a stretch than it would be for someone like Apple, or even Facebook, which acquired Instagram for $1 billion in a mix of both cash and stock. Yahoo’s purchase of Tumblr, if the terms are correct, is a strong indicator of just how badly it wants to expand into media-based social networking.
As of 3/31 Yahoo had just under $1.2b of actual cash on hand. And deal is $1.1b cash? Time to liquify that $1.8b of "short-term investments"— (@danprimack) May 19, 2013
We’ve contacted both Yahoo and Tumblr for comment, and so far have only received a boilerplate “We don’t comment on rumors or speculation” from Yahoo. If Tumblr gets back to us, we’ll update this piece.
Google is offering a version of the Samsung Galaxy S4, arguably one of the top current Android devices, with Jelly Bean 4.2 unlocked on Google Play beginning June 26, the company revealed at I/O today. The news is big because it’s the first non-Nexus device to get blessed with this opportunity, and Google says it will be updated in time with all other Nexus devices.
The Galaxy S4 will cost $649 with no contract, and will be usable on both AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S., Google said today. At that price it isn’t exactly cheap, but people are probably willing to pay for an untouched Android experience on some of the most powerful smartphone hardware available.
The S4 is not only carrier unlocked, but it also has a fully unlocked bootloader. That means that owners of the device can load their own software on to the device, including things like CyanogenMod, which allows for extremely deep device software customization options. In other words, this new unlocked S4 will essentially be the ultimate developer plaything, but again it’s likely to have more or less niche appeal because of the high price tag.
What’s interesting about this is that Samsung emphasized all its software additions to the stock Android experience at the Galaxy S4 launch event, and this is basically stripping all that away. Reviewers seemed more or less overwhelmed by Samsung’s software smorgasbord, so this might result in a much better device overall.
Remember NVIDIA’s kooky Project SHIELD tablet? The one it unveiled to an unsuspecting public at back CES? Well, it’s officially not just a “project” anymore — it’s a full-fledged product, and NVIDIA is aiming to get the SHIELD out the door this June complete with a $349 price tag.
To help manage demand for the curious gaming portable, NVIDIA is also preparing to take pre-orders. If you’ve been eagerly devouring what Shield details you could and have subscribed to the Shield newsletter, you’ll be able to lock down your unit starting today — the rest will have to wait until next Monday to get their pre-orders in.
To help manage demand for the curious gaming portable, NVIDIA is also preparing to take pre-orders. If you’ve been eagerly devouring what Shield details you could and have subscribed to the Shield newsletter, you’ll be able to lock down your unit starting today — the rest will have to wait until next Monday to get their pre-orders in.
In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on what the Shield has to offer, here’s a quick rundown on what to expect. The thing runs Android Jelly Bean MR1, and manages to cram NVIDIA’s speedy new Tegra 4 chipset, 2GB of RAM, a 5-inch multi-touch display running at 720p, 16GB of internal storage, and a microSD storage slot into a controller body that’s awfully reminiscent of the venerable Xbox 360 controller. Throw in the ability to stream certain PC games from a computer and you’ve got yourself a neat little gizmo.
The Shield is an ambitious little gadget, and the ability for players to stream PC games to the thing is sure to win it some fans, but is this thing really going to sell? Let’s just consider the price tag for a moment: selling the Shield at $349 means it’s more expensive than buying an XBox 360 or a PlayStation 3. Granted, those consoles will soon be superseded by a new batch of hardware from Microsoft and Sony, but I suspect people would still rather get one of those more traditional consoles than an ambitious niche device like the Shield.
That’s to say nothing of the fact that the Shield is a device meant for on-the-go gaming. These past few months have seen both Nintendo and Sony slash the prices of their respective handheld gaming consoles in an effort to life sales, maneuvers that seem to have succeeded for now. The market may not be ready for a $349 handheld, but that hasn’t stopped NVIDIA from trying — now we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
