Jolla teams up with Nokia designers Infinity for first SailFish phone

Jolla, the company fuelling the development of SailFishOS and the devices that will run it, was founded by several ex-Nokia employees. Now it seems in the run up to its debut in the smartphone market later this year, the company is once again turning to the Finnish mobile giant, or at least to the design agency that delivered so many of Nokia’s famous products.

Jolla is partnering with Finland’s Infinity, the company that designed Nokia's phones. The company has designed over 50 headsets and chargers as well as designing a wide range of phones for Chinese company Huawei. The company is currently in the process of developing an e-ink paper in conjunction with the widely-read People's Daily newspaper in China, which it hopes will replace the more traditional way of getting news.

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Hopefully, Infinity will put this varied experience to good use for the first ever SailFishOS phone. The company, previously known as Provoke, posted an entry on its blog announcing the partnership and said “there's exciting stuff to follow!”

The SailfishOS was shown off late last year

Infinity has not only worked with Nokia and Huawei, but also designed products for BMW, Fiskars and Sasken. The Huawei connection is interesting as Jolla has made no bones about the fact that it wants to get a strong foothold in the Chinese market. It could also mean that Huawei is onboard as a hardware partner to show the new OS.

SailFishOS is one of at least four open source OSes to launch this year, along with the Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu for mobile. Jolla released an Alpha SDK of the operating system targetted at developers working on Linux systems (Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 12.10), but a PC and Mac-compatible version is in the works. Jolla has placed great emphasis on the adaptability of the OS and claims Sailfish will support smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, automotive devices and more. Developers will be able to build solutions using existing open source projects such as Qt, Mer Core and the Linux kernel.

Jolla showed off the SailfishOS, being developed by the company’s Sailfish Alliance division, in November last year. The focus of the OS is multitasking and users are able to interact with running applications directly on the homescreen. Actions like ending calls, replying to texts, or pausing songs are possible without entering the application in question.

Jolla is convinced that it'll be able to release its very first handset by the end of the year, which is great news, and we hope it will be a great looking device for the polished OS.