What makes Jolla so special?

Jolla rises from the ashes of Nokia Meego, having second pre-order round ongoing. Jolla differentiates itself from other brand mobile manufacturers in many ways.

First of all, Sailfish, the operating system based on Mer is 100% open source. No proprietary binary code included. If you doubt what the device do, you can always check it from the original source - the source code. That makes it difficult to hide any call-back-home or other nasty features among functionality of the software.

Secondly, as Jolla states they have no operations or servers physically located in the US, and as such they are not oblicated to disclose any user information to NSA. In the past, technical intelligence programs like Echelon were dedicated to listen to trunk networks. As all traffic is nowadays more or less encrypted, it's easier to access the data at  the end-point of communication, where the data is available in decrypted format, and that's where PRISM hits.

Third, Sailfish will provide superior compatibility with applications from different platforms with little or no modifications, including Meego, Android, Unix, Linux and HTML5. That's not only because Jolla-sailors think they can do it, but especially to gain the ecosystem fast. Jolla targets to 500K+ apps at the beginning.

There are many appealing aspects in the Sailfish concept, like support for many programming technologies including Qt, HTML5, Android and many more, and the unique software development and emulation environment, which makes it possible to develop and test Sailfish applications prior existence of the actual hardware, and in any host OS.

From the history we know that technical superiority by itself is not always defining the winning solution. The concept needs much more, like believable and creditable story, the ecosystem, and of course, paying customers. Jolla has still long way to go, but according to some analysts, Sailfish has good chance to beat the market share of Windows Phone. The growth is expected to happen especially in the China and other Asia, where Jolla provides a non-US alternative at the mobile market.