Another announcement from Jolla today is it’s adding support for Sony’s Open Devices Program — meaning developers looking to run Sailfish on additional hardware will be able to choose from certain Sony Xperia devices in future. The Xperia X will be first in line to get support, and is being demoed by Jolla running Sailfish here at MWC.

Jolla says it’s aiming to release an official version of the Sailfish OS for a range of Sony Mobile’s Xperia devices “soon”. It last released a community device of its own making, the Jolla C, back in May 2016.

“For us it’s very important that we have a solid hardware partner to offer Sailfish devices to the market,” says Saarnio. “And Sony is the perfect partner for these kind of secure devices. For us it was too much to develop our own phone in an organization that is focused on software development, so I think this is a very good move from our side in that our developers can keep a proper device for Sailfish and use that. And why not our fans as well?”

Jolla says the Chinese consortium will be aiming to invest $250M in developing a Sailfish ecosystem for the country, though it’s not specifying exactly is backing the consortia at this point, nor over what timeframe the investment will happen — beyond saying one of its early investors, a local private equity investor Shan Li, will take a “leading role” in building it up.

“What we have been talking about is starting with the security phone area, so there are corporate and government use-cases where a secure mobile operating system is needed. That’s the first use-case that we are going to start implementing [with the China consortium],” he adds. “In addition to this I would say there’s lot of potential in other areas like TV, also IoT, smartwatches, maybe smart home areas. Those are areas which we, Jolla, did not enter into those areas — because our own resources have been so limited.

Sony Open Mobil rumor confirmed:
https://twitter.com/JollaHQ/status/836173411420356608

Xperia to be next Community device \o/