Jolla Unwraps Sailfish OS with Multi-tasking Features and Personalization Options

Jolla Mobile has unwrapped and showed off the UI of its new OS, Sailfish on Wednesday at the Slush conference. Jolla Mobile, which was reborn from the MeeGo team, formerly a part of Nokia, did not reveal much about the OS but stated that it would be open source.

The UI of Sailfish, which draws much inspiration from the popular Harmattan UI seen on Nokia N9, is designed to favor single-handed usage. Sailfish, which will run on MeeGo-based OS, will target not only smartphones but also other devices like tablets, smart TVs and so on.

The Sailfish UI promises a lot of features to make it a unique experience for the user, such as focus on use of gestures, personalization, exceptional multi-tasking facilities as well as facilitation of effortless interaction. The active applications can be pinned as tiles to the homescreen, which allows control over them, bringing a ‘true multitasking’ experience. Jolla Mobile team also showcased a feature known as ‘Ambience’ which gives the UI a color tint based on the picture that a user selects.

The SDK for the OS based on Qt creator, will also be available very soon, which will make it easy for developers to shift over applications built for MeeGo and Symbian. Use of Qt based platform is interesting in the sense that developers will be able to dabble in Android and iOS platforms along with Sailfish OS.

Jolla also mentioned that Sailfish will make use of multiple chipset technologies and claimed it to be already being supported on NovaThor platforms. For the promotion and sale of Sailfish smartphones in the home market, Jolla Mobile will partner with DNA, a Finnish carrier.

Watch the Jolla Sailfish UI video