A mobile company, Jolla, (founded in the fall of 2011 and based in Finland) comprising of six N9 core professionals will soon be coming up with new smartphones that will be using Linux-based “MeeGo” operating system. The official announcements for the new smartphone version, Jolla’s OS and products (hoped to be made by next week) will not be a mere support system to Nokia’s N9 smartphones.
Jolla advisor and Jukka Eklund (former MeeGo product manager) were quoted saying that they will be developing their own smartphone OS based on MeeGo as well as their own UI for new products. The company’s start up is funded by international and domestic private investors. It has also been revealed that the team of six professionals will be including Marko Saukko,(formerly a core maintainer for the Mer Project, a Linux distro for mobile devices) and will be led by Marc Dillon ( principal engineer behind MeeGo at Nokia up until May 2012) but the latter part of the news is yet to be clarified.
Now Jolla, a joint venture of N9 core professionals and MeeGo community alumni, is said to be working with Nokia on hiring issues so as to escape prompting non-compete clauses in employees’ contracts. Eklund was also quoted saying Jolla is to create applications for Nokia N9 smartphones as well as desktop environments (making use of Nokia’s Qt SDK) which along with the device are going to be open-sourced.
Nokia’s MeeGo-powered N9, was a side project for Nokia, and was seen as a long term investment (a year ago at time of its launch) in Windows phone, but was never released in North America and was doomed by many from the start.
