Finnish start-up Jolla in discussions Indian smartphone makers to license its Sailfinsh OS

Finnish start-up Jolla, formed by former Nokia employees, is in discussion with Indian and global smartphone makers to licence its Sailfish operating system, a move that could help the company expand the ecosystem for the OS, The Economic Times reported.

Sami Pienimaki, chief marketing officer and co-founder of Jolla said the company was in discussion with the 'usual suspect' device manufactures in India. He added, the company had a few deals, which were not public, at the global level. The company was in advance talks with some bigger device manufactures, he added.

According to Pienimaki, Jolla wanted to work with app developers as well in India and was exploring more business models for device vendor tie-ups.

He added, the company wanted device manufacturers and internet companies to hop on board to bring differential products and services to the market.

According to commentators, the company planned to offer its open source Sailfish OS free to device manufacturers, hoping to monetise the OS through deeper integration of services.

He said although Android was theoretically free, companies that wanted to grow bigger ended up paying money for Google's service integration.

According to the company there was a need for a modern and independent mobile OS that enabled free competition without control by a single player.

According to Tech 2, the key highlight of the Jolla device was the design of the UI, multitasking ability, among several other things. The OS was not about single views, its developers called it all about verticality.

Though the user interface looked like it had much in common with Blackberry 10, Windows Phone and Android, the developers had managed to put them together and build an interactive gesture-based user interface that lent a unique quality to the device.

Sailfish OS would feature a multitasking implementation similar to what had been seen in BlackBerry 10. The apps that run currently would be shown in a grid-styled interface that showed the whole window of the running apps. Much like Android widgets, users could interact with them directly.

For instance, in the mail app, users could drag from the left to create a new message, or drag from the right to refresh messages, while for the phone app, they could drag from the left to get the dialer, or drag from the right to get their list of contacts.

Each tile also featured live information like Windows Phone and could even continue playback of video. If one replaced the back cover of one's phone with a customised The Other Half cover, got a special content.