Jolla Tablet and the new UI

At MWC 15 Jolla focused on their crowd-sourced tablet which received plenty of positive feedback from visitors and won Trusted Reviews’ Best Tablet of MWC15 award. The hardware design with its specific characteristics sticks out the mass and offered with Sailfish OS 2.0 an unique product at the heavily Android-dominated Mobile World Congress.

The Jolla logo decorates the tablet’s matt surface on the back side and adds a nice touch to the simple and elegant design. The prototype’s plastic casing feels premium, allows a good grip and sits comfortably in the hand. Notable are the rounded sides of the tablet which follow the Jolla phone design and also remind of the Nokia N9. This works well together with the new Sailfish OS 2.0 interface that now mainly focuses on horizontal swipe gestures.

Bottom side with micro-USB port and microSD card slot

Decent Jolla logo on back side

Sailfish os 2.0 on jolla tablet

Jolla has been working hard on improving the Sailfish OS user interface and in fact, it seems much easier to navigate the system. First time users certainly will understand the interface design faster. The UI looks less static due to small, fluid animations and visual hints whenever the user interacts. On top of that, Sailfish OS 2.0 looks without doubts more polished and beautiful than ever before.

According to graphic designer Zhidi Shang, Jolla’s design team has been working several months on collecting and analysing given feedback from Sailfish OS consumers and community. As a result Jolla decided to go away from the previous vertical menu navigation. Sailfish OS 2.0 UI is now closer to MeeGo Harmattan with a carousel-like horizontal UI including events view, multitasking view (home-screen) and optionally a partnership space.

New application grid

The application grid is available by swiping up and thus replaces the former events view – Sailfish OS 2.0 allows to access and open other applications at any time (without having to close/minimize the active application window) which in my opinion strengthens the multitasking-power of Jolla’s mobile system. And by the way, the colourful icons look very neat on the solid black background.

Swipe up at any time to access applications

Improved events view

A lot has been done with the events view. Accessed by a left-to-right swipe, the user gets an overview of received messages, emails, social-media feeds and more. For reasons of clarity, same notifications are merged together but can be expanded. Next to that we have shortcuts to settings and application-features (which were not yet all the way functional on the demo-software).

Improved events view with app and settings shortcuts

Notifications on lock-screen look a bit different as well (see following photo). Whenever you “peek” from within the open application you see all your running apps in multitasking-view as well as these new notifications icons at the very same place shown in the photo below. Therefore Sailfish OS 2.0 combines the former peek-up (notifications + events) and peek-to-side (multitasking-view) into one gesture. If you swipe the open application away, you switch into multitasking view and the left-sided notification icons disappear.

New icons on lock- and home-screen

Multitasking view and homescreen

Not much has changed visually in multitasking view. A notable factor is that cover actions aren’t triggered any more by the same gesture, but by clicking the icons. That seems less elegant but was changed to avoid conflicts with the horizontal UI swipe gestures. The order of multitasking windows is a bit different as well: Windows stay in order the way you opened them and aren’t re-arranged each time you view a running app.

Multitasking view / homescreen

New Ambience profiles

Sailfish OS 2.0 will include more thought out ambience-features and makes better use of the hole idea. The demo-software showed us examples of time-triggered functions and connection to Bluetooth-devices by switching ambiences. This is a great improvement and transforms ambiences into powerful profiles.

The ambience-switcher appears by swiping down, which eliminates the “swipe-to-close” application gesture. Jolla is aware that not everyone might like this change and are working on finding a solution – your feedback counts (visit together.jolla.com for that). It seems that swipe-to-close felt unnatural to many new Sailfish OS users who expected a pull-down menu instead of closing the application (like in Android or iOS).

New ambience switcher

Overall impressions of Sailfish OS 2.0 UI

Yes, Sailfish OS 2.0 is quite different and probably confuses long-term Jolla users at first. But the changes are easy and fast to learn (at MWC we got used to it within a few minutes) – the new UI certainly is more intuitive and you will easily find what you are looking for. Compared to last year’s Mobile World Congress it took less time to explain Sailfish OS to first-timers and journalists/reviewers had no struggle to review the devices and its software. It’s important for Jolla to have a software with a short learning curve that attracts people who are used to other mobile operating systems, instead of discourage them with to many foreign gestures. But Jolla managed to simplify the system, without losing the uniqueness of Sailfish OS – we liked the demo-upgrade a lot at MWC 15, on tablet and phone.

What are your thoughts about the Jolla tablet and Sailfish OS 2.0? Don’t miss Jolla User’s video-demo:

Mar 12, 2015Alain

Comments: 25

Roger Powell
4 years ago
Looks great, will I be able to seamlessly share data from my Jolla mobile phone with the tablet via a wireless connection? I have pre-ordered the table anticipating it will work “as one” with my Jolla phone in much the same way the Apple I-Phone and I-Pad do.
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- Elioty
  4 years ago
  Hum, the thing with your iPhone/iPad couple is that they relies on a cloud service, they don’t really communicate directly from one to the other. So for the Jolla phone and tablet, it depends on the deep-enough integration of a cloud service. And there was no mention of it so I won’t expect that to come with Sailfish OS 2.0.
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  - Roger Powell
    4 years ago
    Hi Elioty, many thanks for such a speedy response, much appreciated. From my perspective, that’s a huge omission in the Sailfish philosophy as I had assumed there would be a benefit to owning the Jolla phone and the tablet together. Many thanks anyway even if I am feeling a little sad. cheers Rog
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    - Shaun
      4 years ago
      Jolla don’t have their own cloud service like Apple do with iCloud or Google do with their services.
      
      You have to patch it together with other people’s services such as Google, Microsoft Exchange, Fruux, Yahoo etc or possibly run your own ownCloud server on some shared hosting. Therein lies a problem though; Jolla’s support of third party services is as buggy as hell and not worth relying on.
      
      If want shared contacts, calendar, notes, reminders, docs etc, go Apple or Android. There’s no point in using Jolla until they fix this.
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      - Roger Powell
        4 years ago
        That’s a worry, I had been hoping to link my Jolla phone and tablet when it arrives to share data with each other and a remote terminal server at our HQ. Android devices are not very useful due to microsoft licensing issues. Apple does not have these issues, but is very restrictive in so many other ways. I was hoping Sailfish would be a win – win opportunity.
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      - Shaun
        4 years ago
        Microsoft licencing issues?
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Luciano
4 years ago
Nice article, there is a good summary of the new features and some deeper analysis that makes me feel less nervous about the changes.

But please check for typos: peek vs peak, whole vs hole and quiet vs quite. 🙂
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Piero
4 years ago
I can accept the reasoning behind most of these changes, though I am of the same opinion as people that say that notification view is cluttered, but one thing is a big error IMO. The cover gestures being replaced by buttons. That’s actually lame IMO. It compromises long term UI gain for the sake of learning curve.
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pilq
4 years ago
Pity to see that Jolla is dismantling their superb UI. Back from the future… to Android and iOS age. I do hope the old UI will be open sourced for community when we’ll be upgrading to 2.0.
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- Shaun
  4 years ago
  Agreed. This is one step forward and two back. I really hope they open the UI so we can mix in the events view, which is the only worthwhile change in 2.0, with the old UI.
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Gren
4 years ago
If the reason they dumb the interface down is trying yo be similar to iOS/Droid they are making a HUGE mistake.

FFS it is a different os. You are going to make people want it because it is awesome not because it resembles another one.
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Alain
4 years ago
Jolla designers certainly don’t try to create another Android or iOS copy – and I wouldn’t call the enhancements a “dumb down”. Nothing is missing from Sailfish OS 1.X and it’s surely easier to understand the UI. In my personal opinion this years feedback from MWC visitors about the UI was much better than last year – so I think that Jolla does a lot right.

But I hope that users will have options to customize UI-interactions and keep it as unlike as they want. We all should give v2.0 a chance to realize how well done it is 🙂

@Luciano: Thanks! 🙂
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- Elioty
  4 years ago
  You forgot one thing that is missing in Sailfish OS 2.0 over 1.X (apart from the swipe-down to close app, but they are working on a solution for this matter): apps’ cover are now limited to a single cover action instead of two! Button instead of swipe is just a HCI matter (so it’s pretty subjective) but only one cover action instead of two is a real functional regression. They could just simply put two cover action buttons side by side though.
  Apart from that, I am very enthusiast to test Sailfish OS 2.0 myself and I feel like I love every other changes already.
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  - Shaun
    4 years ago
    I can see why they’ve gone for one action. Previously with a choice of two swipes you had two large targets. Two tiny icons to tap would be near impossible to be accurate with.
    
    The answer is of course to go back to two gestures but that seems to be out of fashion with Jolla who seem to be chucking away what made them ‘unlike’
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  - Domie
    4 years ago
    Picture with multitasking windows shows a music app (with TheFirstOne Ringtone) that has 2 cover actions. Where did you hear it would only have one?
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    - Elioty
      4 years ago
      I don’t have the reference/source right now but I saw a few videos of Sailfish OS 2.0 with the clock app opened and it had only one cover action contrary to the two we currently have with 1.X. Maybe it’s just a rework of Jolla’s apps and they might keep the support of two cover actions you think?
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    - Elioty
      4 years ago
      On this video for example you can see the clock app cover which only has the “new alarm” cover action and doesn’t have the “new timer” cover action anymore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaFfVFipyro
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      - al
        4 years ago
        See https://blog.jolla.com/design-insights-sailfish-os/ . There it is explained that there will be onr or two cover actions depending on the app.
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TJ
4 years ago
It doesn’t look good that the whole user interface has had to be redesigned so quickly. Why did they make such fundamental errors? I suspect that this signals a move towards a more standard interface – rather defeating the “unlike” concept. Has TOH died a quiet death or is there still optimism that this will continue? In my opinion, Jolla must bring out something new (ie not what is essentially – like all tablets – an iPad without the benefits). A mobile device which can behave (via a dock) as a desktop device possibly? I wonder whether the market considers the jolla (first phone) a “success”?
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sjjd
4 years ago
I like the new ui, and I agree that we need swiping down to close app. That is all I want.
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Nrde
4 years ago
I welcome the N9’ish simpler homescreen notification arrangement. But I’m not so keen on:

– no top swipe to close, this should at least be configurable, how are we supposed to close a program then? So if not clear yet, close from top is the best single feature of Sailfish (and Meego in N9)
– Coveractions need to stay in some way, at least in phone where the screen estate limit’s exat button pressing and at the same time doesn’t prevent swiping from side to change to notifications for example.
– on the other hand I seldom use more than 1 cover action (music player being the exception) so maybe that’s doable with a button.
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Mr. Pulley-menu
4 years ago
No pulley-menu in the Home screen or the multitasking view to make calls or SMS quickly, and in addition they removed the apps from the multitasking view… This update makes things harder and slower for people like me, who use the Jolla phone for communicating =/
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Sebastian
4 years ago
Missing swipe down to close, but other than that I like the simplification of the UI.
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nyonglema
4 years ago
Hey,

Ok I’m also frustrated by the radical change of UI. My big issue is they have walked away from most of the core design principles from the start. However, I like that they intend to stay competitive by constantly reinventing themselves, especially that they have gone back to the N9 type interaction which I so love.

Regarding the REAL issue for me, which is the loss of the simple and innovative cover actions, in favour of under-specced widgets (with just 1 control button), I suggest that since the issue is the horizontal swipe, and since there are no in “multitasking view” vertical actions, the cover actions can be moved to top and bottom swipes on the covers, but retaining the ability to activate them with touch.

This way, the Android guys can still touch their fiddly little buttons, but we who signed up for the Unlike from day one keep our beloved swipes: how’s that?
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- Dan
  4 years ago
  @nyonglema: sounds like a great suggestion. PLEASE post it on tjc!
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