The iPhone was.

It was also merely a new implementation of already existing technologies and ideas

How so?

Touchscreens? First phone with touchscreen was launched in 1993.
Capacitive touchscreen? Invented in 60s.
Gesture based controls? Introduced in 2004 and not by Apple.
Multitouch? Introduced by FingerWorks (later aquired by Apple).
App store? Even Nokia had those before Apple.

Basically iPhone was just successful implementation of existing ideas. It's called revolutionary only because of successful implementation and impact resulted because of it.

If you were USAian, perhaps. If you were European we'd already had smartphones for over a decade. The genius of apple was dumbing it down enough that it appealed to a mass market, ease of use and convincing the US carriers to carry it without them fecking about with the software.

Couple that with the incumbent leaders being disorganised and going through a patch of shipping truly awful products with software past is prime and it was the perfect time for disruption.

It wasn't revolutionary. It was disruptive. Rendered a decade of smartphones sold in Europe obsolete via good marketing and solid distribution channels.

Has zero to do with being am American - North American for those that really ****ing love semantics.

At least in the US market it was revolutionary not because of technical specs, but because it changed the relationship between phone manufacturers and the consumer. Before the iPhone, manufacturers considered the phone service provider to be the customer. The service provider specified what the phone could do, so that the service provider could maximize profit, very much at the expense of the quality of the end-user's experience. Apple, and Apple alone, had the clout to say that they would not cripple their product to satisfy the very short-sighted goals of the service providers. I'm not aware of how things worked in other markets, but in the US that was a revolution.

Hi guys, I've been reading this forum with interest, as I've been idling around here since the N9 and then Jolla days.

As you may guess, my schedule right now is nightmarish, but I'd like to try and find some time every now and then to answer any questions you might have. I know we have made and will make choices not everyone will agree with, but we are aiming to build a truly special user experience and a unique platform.

I think one topic that hasn't really been touched on is how Solu really works as a user experience. This is no mere dumb terminal, as it aims to bring as much of the content onto the device as possible, using it as a huge cache. It works disconnected. We built it around a subscription model so we can offer a full service, and to continue to support this month after month. That means pretty much all the storage you can eat, full history (think, automatic versioning of the whole desktop, and individual app environments) and, very importantly, to bring revenue to developers (even opensource ones!) just from the fact that users use their applications. A real incentive to develop, which I think Jolla, unfortunately, has lacked (though I respect their efforts a lot, and own a Jolla myself).

But what really pushes the boundaries is how the desktop works. There is no longer a separation between applications and content. You simply zoom in on whatever you want to work on. When you share, you share both the content, and the app or tool to manipulate that. The others in your team or group do not have to install anything. They simply zoom in to use the content, and to start collaboration. And yes, all of this works both offline and online, with merging happening in the background.

This is a massive vision, and it will take a while for the world to grasp the implications, but we really honestly think this is how computers should work today.

I like the look of the OS and the device, but I'm not a fan of handing over my data to some internet service, both for privacy reasons but more broadly because I don't like the stuff I own to depend on services I don't have any control over. I prefer to host my own server at home and sync with that. Do you plan to support that configuration in the future?

Also, your OS seems to bear a resemblance to the Octonauts' OS. Could we consider this an early demo?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fddw6Zzc9MM&t=149

Heh, nice reference. I posted the Octonauts video to the team.

In terms of privacy, one of our founders is the founder of the largest security company in the Nordics, and a well known expert in privacy and security. Even Mikko Hyppönen has been tweeting about Solu. Reason? We are very conscious of that and our business model is such that we have zero interest in selling any of your data. Quite the opposite. We are aiming to host the data in Finnish data centres, where there are —*at least for the moment — no data sharing agreements with the US (unlike e.g. Sweden and most of Western Europe). We are also building preparations for using convergent encryption on the device so that content can be shared with the team members, but everyone has their own key. That means everything gets encrypted when it goes up to us in a manner that even we do not know what data is there.

You will be able to export the raw data from our system, or select portions of it, though Solu is very much built around using our service for interaction and collaboration.

I guess my own question would be, wouldn't Solu make more sense as a pure cloud service, rather than a sort of combo portable computer / cloud service? Rather than forcing the user to plug a monitor and keyboard into and out of the device each time they move to or away from their desk, they could simply log into Solu using their existing computer. Or use their existing mobile device to log into Solu, while they are on the move.

If you prefer to have each user have a personal hardware device (say, for security reasons and/or to maintain local data), a USB dongle would seem to make more sense. The user could simply plug a Solu dongle into their desktop computer to log in, or into their mobile device (as USB-OTG is becoming fairly standard on most mobile devices today).

It just seems kind of odd to center Solu around an independent mobile device, when it appears that a significant portion of its use will be while plugged into desktop peripherals. Why not take advantage of the most common desktop peripheral available today, the PC itself?