The Nokia N9 (Photo credit: SapiensBryan)
You have to hand it to the former Nokia employees who decided to set up a company to build the Linux smartphone they believe the market wants. Naming your company 'dinghy' as you leave Nokia to enter the start-up world to produce a new smartphone is very Finnish.
But the company known as Jolla is more than a lifeboat. Jussi Hurmola and Marc Dillon have gathered together a team of around 50 employees, raised financing for their first handset, sourced and signed contracts with suppliers, and are putting in place everything else required for a modern smartphone.
Their first goal? To sell 100,000 units.
It might not be the nine million pre-orders that the Samsung Galaxy S3 has, but that's enough to build a company around. After all, Ferrari sell less than ten thousand cars a year, but they're still regarded as a success, so why not a similar model in the smartphone world?
This is what makes Jolla interesting to me. The smartphone game right now is heavily focussed on the volume side of personal computing, grabbing market share from others, building the biggest app store, and dominating the competition.
That's one way to be a successful business, but there is another. As Ferrari show, it's not always about volume, it's about having something desirable and relatively unique. If your product brings in more money than it costs, and you can develop the next models with that surplus, then you have a sustainable business.
With some decent strategy and a fair wind, I can see Jolla emerging as one of the leading 'boutique' smartphone manufacturers in 2013. It's unlikely to make any significant in-roads in terms of market share, the price will be higher than similarly specced handsets due to the relatively low volumes Jolla will sell, and it's likely that the first handsets will be purchased sim-free in the West as opposed to being widely available through a network contract.
That's fine though - if there is demand for a Finnish designed Linux smartphone and Jolla can deliver that, I see no reason why they can't make this a success.
There is a proven market out there for this style of hackable and open sourced phone. Nokia's MeeGo powered N9 has a lot of love in tech circles, and many are convinced that the lack of sales figures coming out of Nokia are more about protecting the aura around the Lumia Windows Phone range, rather than a poorly performing handset. Given their work in Nokia with the MeeGo platform, Jolla will have a good idea how large this market is, and will know what is attractive in terms of hardware, software, and support.
It might not get a huge amount of third party support, but if all the basics are there in terms of core applications, if the platform is open enough that a handful of dedicated HTML5 and Qt developers can fill in the gaps, and if they can keep a tight control on all the costs involved, then Jolla could carve out a very nice segment of the market.
