Is Jolla for Real?

Former visionaries from Nokia are trying something new, and it's getting plenty of notice. 
Finnish boutique smartphone company Jolla last month let us know a little more about their new smartphone platform, Sailfish OS. Many industry watchers have been watching to see what the small company can deliver.

According to Forbes: 

"The covers were taken off Sailfish OS  this morning, with a presentation video showing off the clean lines of the UI, including the multi-tasking, a number of applications, and the ‘pulley menu’".

Sharp eyed viewers will also spot a certain green logo… While Sailfish is not running Android, it does offer a significant amount of compatibility with Android applications. There should be a significant number of third party applications that will run on any Sailfish handset out of the box."

Jolla believes that Sailfish will become a legitimate alternative to Android and Apple's iOS. What makes this group of fewer than 100-odd Finns, most of them refugees from the sinking ship that is Nokia, think they stand a chance?  According to Quartz:

"Jolla cannot possibly take on Google and Apple head-to-head, and it doesn’t plan to. Rather, the company, which is rapidly becoming a Finnish-Chinese hybrid with headquarters in both Helsinki and Hong Kong, and an R&D operation in a yet-to-be-named location in mainland China, plans to nurture and grow an entirely new mobile “ecosystem” — meaning the phones, the operating system that runs on them, and the apps that run on that. And it plans to do it in China because that is the one market producing first-time buyers of smartphones fast enough to give such a scheme a chance.

In order to get its operating system and, eventually, Jolla-branded phones, in front of enough Chinese, the company has partnered with the largest mobile chain retailer in the country, D.Phone. Not only will D.Phone sell Sailfish-powered phones through its 2100 outlets; it is also part of the Sailfish Alliance, a group of software and hardware companies that will all be able to add standards and code to the open-source OS."

Here Comes the First Real Alternative to iPhone and Android - Quartz via Mashable: http://mashable.com/2012/12/02/here-comes-the-first-real-alternative-to-iphone-and-android/?goback=.gde_23013_member_194500408
 Is this the next big phone OS?  Meet Jolla's MeeGo based Sailfish OS - GigaOM: http://gigaom.com/europe/heres-what-jollas-sailfish-os-the-future-of-meego-looks-like/
Jolla Sets sail on the Smartphone Sea - Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2012/11/21/jolla-sets-sail-on-the-smartphone-sea-and-reveals-sailfish-os-with-android-support/