My Lost Other Half

Yesterday was the biggest day of Jolla’s life since they were born in Q4 of 2011.Their life has been full of awesomeness, ups and downs and many stories inside their office in Finland. Back in the year of 2012, they introduced themselves via a twitter account.

Since then, every MeeGo enthusiast was running around screaming happiness because MeeGo that everyone thought is dead, was indeed alive underneath a better, faster, and more stable, gesture based (Just like the father!) operating system called Sailfish OS. It was yet again a revolution in multi-tasking along with tons of new revolutionary features coming along with it but the only problem was that it always was shown on a Nokia N950 DevKit device not a real Jolla phone!

So Jolla promised that there will be their own designed and engineered handset in the nearest future which brings us to 20/05/2013 known as Jolla Love Day! Interesting enough, an unexpected number of people was waiting for this day and Jolla says it’s “Jolla and their Community” that has done all the work of keeping people enthusiastic and charged up until Jolla’s designer team shows their work. But before the due date, they teased us with a video called I AM THE OTHER HALF  followed by the same title,  hash-tagged in Twitter and every day they showed pictures made of two sides or halves, completing each other.

To be honest it was killing me because only two things were in my imagination and guesses about this “Other Half” thing one was a full slide QWERTY physical keyboard which made me very happy inside! and the other was completing me like when male and female make each other complete, I thought this phone is gonna be my wife or something! 😀

I had to wait and see what all the fuss is about! and I can bet no one was thinking as wise as Jolla themselves about this other half theory!

 

Yup! the time has come and we first saw a phone made out of two halves and many people started saying: “Is that all? changing colors and that’s it? “

I was quite sure there’s something more to it when I saw the phone. I saw a phone with two equal halves and I thought, yea maybe the other half is something more than changing colors, whilst I was saying it a video came out on Engadget verifying my thoughts about The Other Half! 

To fulfill your imagination about what The Other Half is about, you need to think beyond the things you knew till now! We have seen iPhones with weird things sticking out of their connectors as their accessories and we have seen Symbian and Android devices that can support USB OTG for connecting memory sticks and things like that to them, but for understanding The Other Half we have to bold our imagination and expand what we were imagining right now.

For instance

Imagine yourself sitting in class teacher is not coming, you’re getting bored, you  just take the other half “the gamepad” and replace it with the back cover of your phone and start playing games!

Or you’re used to chat in travelling or you’ve to write a long email, just take the other half  “the QWERTY keypad” and start writing it with a huge speed!

Or even more while travelling, listening to Music and chatting and etc, battery went low, take the other half “the extra battery” and charge the Jolla.

One example from Marc Dillon as he spoke in their Jolla Love Day and some other interviews, imagine you’re in a club, it’s dark and you wanna take some photos you just replace your back cover with a giant flash and it gives you extra light for brighter pictures!

How cool are these facilities? Of course for now they showed only colors! but even on that part they said each cover is programmed to change the behavior of your device, even you can program it yourself, for example if you change to black, it’s for night and the device goes silent with lower display brightness and lower volume for Media! or even simpler things, you’re wearing jeans, just pick the blue other half and set it with your cloths!

 

Speaking of the design cues

Jolla hired the best designer companies around for the purpose of designing the exterior of their phone and happily, they haven’t disappoint anyone. The paradox between two halves, one side curvy and the other half flat on the sides, same story at both ends.  The little  JOLLA  written on the top, those magnificent colors matching any mood is just making my eyes melt for it. The combination of aluminium, glass and plastic are just mind boggling.

 

Sadly there are a few criticisms as well like the screen being  surrounded by blackness of the device. In my opinion that makes the screen to look smaller than 4.5 inch! Like the N9, it has to be connected to the edges and also from the top and bottom, there has to be more screen that useless glass, if you are designing a phone without any button on the surface, that means there has to be more screen not just some unused space.

In comparison to Nokia N9 which frankly is the predecessor of this device, N9 had a lot of screen on the surface and it just wasn’t surrounded by blackness because it was completely the same color and you couldn’t see the edges that easy and yet again, it was very close to the edges of the surface.

That concludes my only criticism about this device and I really hope they consider fixing it some how.

 

About the Hardware Specifications

There are a few things out about the hardware yet. They are not specified enough to satisfy our taste but as Marc Dillon says in the interview with Pocket Now when Michael Fisher asks him:

“Can you share any additional information on the physical properties of the display? Is it AMOLED or Super LCD, for example?”

And Marc answers:

“We’re leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we’ll provide when we’re close to delivery.”

So we can fully understand their strategy about hiding some details from us. First of all we now know that some parts like the screen are not finished yet, and secondly we know that it’s better to keep people enthusiastic about knowing the device step by step.

So Far what we only know is:

The phone supports LTE.
It has a Dual-Core processor.
4.5 inch screen.
Bluetooth 3.0 (Probably)
8MP Camera with 1080P video recording.
Android App compatibility
16GB internal memory + SD Card support

That’s all we know for now.

In conclusion Jolla phone is a flagship phone with a mid-range price, and with Sailfish, it is the best phone ever! Especially with it’s other half.

Thanks to Saqib Iqbal for giving me ideas about The Other Half.

 

Hope you liked my article about The Jolla Phone.

Cheers.

Sepehr Noori (James)