Jolla spins off hardware division to focus on Sailfish licensing – Total Telecom

Today, though, that’s changing.

Finnish smartphone company Jolla has announced it will no longer be developing hardware.

While Jolla will focus on software rather than hardware moving forward, what remains to be seen is how much demand there is for the Sailfish operating system in a space that’s now dominated by Android, iOS, and to a lesser extent, Windows Phone and BlackBerry software.

As a result of the new development, Dr. Antti Saarnio, Chairman of Board of Jolla Ltd takes charge of leading the company, whereas Dr. Tomi Pienimäki, ex- CEO, has now been appointed to a new position outside the company and will move in August. Jolla took the core of MeeGo and reworked the interface to create its own Sailfish OS.

In a statement, Saarnio said that every young company must eventually find its focus and for Jolla that time is now. Founded in 2011 by ex-Nokia employees, Jolla is now seeing “huge opportunities in the Sailfish OS licensing business” – which probably means that various other companies will soon launch devices running Sailfish.

Moreover, the new Jolla devices company will be announced separately sometime after this summer.

Jolla has no licensees, but Lassila told us that the company will be saying more about the progress of the licence business next week, at Mobile World Congress, in Shanghai.

Jolla said it’s also working to meet deliveries of its new tablet, developed and sold through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. Saarnio says that the Sailfish software is “in good shape”, but that supply issues for hardware components are delaying shipments of the Jolla Tablet. “We expect to solve this issue very soon”.

The move for Jolla from a hardware and OS business to just an OS business has shades of the time when Steve Jobs’ NeXT computers made the same move. The company says it will focus on mobile development and licensing of Sailfish OS with Jolla Ltd., while a new company will be established to handle its hardware ambitions.