We knew this day was coming and its finally here. Jolla has revealed their Meego powered Sailfish OS to the world for the first time. The new mobile operating system will be open-sourced and will be available to use on various devices including smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.While the company hasn't detailed too much about their new operating system, they have provided a short video demonstrating the key features of the platform. One of the features is the operating system's seamless true multi-tasking between apps and the ability to interact with the running apps directly from your device homescreen.
The Sailfish SDK is now available for download for developers who are interested in participating in the future development of the platform.
Jolla has also announced that they are open to collaboration with many different chipset vendors, with ST Ericsson’s NovaThor SoC already supporting the Sailfish OS. This suggests that the first wave of devices running Sailfish may be quite affordable. Unfortunately the company didn't have information on when the first devices will be available in the market.
You can read more information on the announcement from the following press release.
Press Release
Sailfish advances - Sailfish OS, with SDK and UI introduced
Helsinki, Finland - Today at the Slush start-up event Jolla and Sailfish take significant steps forward and bring Sailfish Software Development Kit (SDK) for the community and showcases it effortless and innovative User Interface (UI) for the first time.
Sailfish OS already supports multiple chipset technologies that are being demonstrated today in Slush, and further support is continuously being built for all the major chipsets. Today Jolla is happy to announce that ST-Ericsson is ready to support Sailfish OS in its NovaThor platforms.
"We are pleased to add Sailfish OS to the mobile operating systems supported on our NovaThor ModAp platforms. Supporting Sailfish from its inception shows how flexibly ST-Ericsson's NovaThor platforms can adapt to different mobile OS'es and we look forward to seeing Sailfish powered devices in the market next year," said Peter Oaklander, Senior Vice President for Sales & Marketing, ST-Ericsson.
"We warmly welcome ST-Ericsson onboard. It is great that this industry leader is partnering with us and Sailfish. ST-Ericsson's NovaThor platform combined with Sailfish OS will enable vendors to bring highly competitive mobile products to the market. We welcome other players in the mobile industry to join and contribute to this game changing movement. We also target to announce other chipset provider partnerships soon," said Marc Dillon, CEO of Jolla.
Sailfish Alliance is first and foremost a movement that will unite OEM and ODM manufacturers, chipset providers, operators, application developers and retailers. The key target is to bring innovation to a stagnating market and help mobile industry players to stay on the bleeding edge of the mobile OS development.
Sailfish SDK preview introduced to facilitate community work and application development
The Sailfish OS and UI are highly adaptable and will support smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, automotive and other device classes. Sailfish is a real opportunity for developers to participate in and build solutions with existing open source projects such as Qt, Mer Core, and the Linux kernel. The new OS will be built through community involvement and participation.
The Sailfish SDK consists of Mer Core's tools, Qt Creator, Jolla UI components, Sailfish UI framework and Sailfish handset application interfaces. The SDK encourages Sailfish friends to extend the tools to support development for their company's style. The SDK is the right choice for Sailfish Alliance partners for both contributing to the direction of the operating system and developing new and magical products.
The SDK is available and developed at www.sailfishos.org.
Fastest Use
The Sailfish user interface, shown for the first time at Slush, has been designed with the most recent consumer needs in mind. With the most modern mobile UI Sailfish provides effortless multitasking.
Users are able to multitask instantly between truly running applications. Even more, users are able to interact with the running applications directly on the home view: ending a call, pausing a song - without needing to enter the application. This multitasking feature brings usability and speed-of-use to a totally new level, unseen in the mobile industry.
The UI features other innovations, the Pulley Menu enabling fast and effortless interaction; at-a-glance peeks at status information; effortless personalization of the device to match the user's style and mood.
For the UI demo, please visit http://www.youtube.com/user/jollaofficial.
source – Jolla