From the Finnish Arvopaperi article yesterday - here. Translation is google translate.

If they're actually moving forward with a partner, or partners, all I can say is thank **** for that! It ought to result in a much better device and will hopefully involve much less cost being incurred by Jolla. Really hope it's high quality Chinese OEMs.

Great ****ing News!



does that mean 3G incoming to tablet?

Article was discussing Asia (China more specifically) and potential there. Intel is their tablet partner. Phone focused Chinese OEMs / e-commerce platforms don't have much to do with Intel tables.

Bad ****ing news!

Most mid-high end Chinese smartphones have both worldwide GSM & 3G compatibility out of the box, and with increasing frequency LTE too. If the device isn't offered to the US by Jolla, I'm sure you could import it from China.

You mean the same Intel that succesfully performed these delaying Maemo 6 manoeuvrings in order to serve Nokia as ready to eat meal to its true partner, Microsoft? Please, noooo..

"Intel and Nokia just announced a new project called MeeGo. MeeGo is supposed to be the result of merging Maemo and Moblin, bringing together the best pieces of those (already quite similar platforms). Interestingly this means that Intel will be sponsoring a mobile Linux distro which will run on ARM."

I don't think that was in any way Intel's plan. Microsoft ending up with the carcass of the Nokia handset business and a giant portfolio of patents, at a time when MS were already very clearly courting ARM, was absolutely the last thing Intel would have wanted. There haven't been any Intel Lumias and there won't be.

Anyway, no matter how big the 'incentives' and 'marketing' money offered by Intel, there's no way Intel will be an attractive prospect for mobile phones. Without telephony, they can bribe their way into tablets, but even for small players like Jolla, in phones they have no useful solution.

Phones won't be Intel. What's interesting is what the initial "reference platform" SoC that they talk about will be. Easy option would probably be Qualcomm, but they'd be going against the trend. If they want to make the biggest splash in mid to high end Chinese handsets going forward, they'd probably be best off going with Mediatek. Almost all the top Chinese OEMs have some Mediatek handsets in all price categories. Some are beginning to diminish or deprecate Qualcomm offerings now. RockChip are making some inroads, and several OEMs are making their own SoCs (ZTE, Huawei, Lenovo). Even Samsung may look to move into the high end aggressively with lots of 20nm and 14nm FINFET capacity coming online next year.

Does that article imply they already, right now have a partner or partners signed or are they still in discussion and have no manufacturer lined up at all yet? I recall they've been wanting partners since the beginning but not sure they have any secured yet.

The tone used (and I later asked a Finnish friend to confirm accuracy) would indeed imply that they are moving forward with partners, and talking about a device appearing later / at some point with Jolla branding would suggest that they've reached an agreement under those terms. Previously all talk about hardware partners has been figurative, or almost pleading.

Oh if that's so this could indeed be quite good news for the future of Jolla.