A company called Jolla was registered in Helsinki last week by former Nokia engineers. They’re going to build a phone. The operating system will be a continuation of MeeGo, the platform Nokia killed when Elop announced the Windows Phone pivot in February.
That’s the whole story right now. No device, no name for the OS yet, no announced hardware partners, no concrete timeline. What they do have is a team that actually built MeeGo and the N9, access to the Mer Project community fork that’s been keeping the open-source pieces alive, and a reason to exist: the N9 reviewed well and sold zero units because Nokia had already moved on before it launched.
I’m interested in this for one reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia. The N9’s gesture navigation was genuinely interesting. No home button, swipe from any edge to do anything useful, multitasking that actually worked. The underlying OS was real Linux, not the Android sandbox. Whether anyone builds on that or lets it die with Nokia’s MeeGo contract is the only thing worth watching here.
The people reported so far: Marc Dillon and Sami Pienimäki. Both Nokia veterans. The team size is unclear, somewhere between fifteen and fifty depending on who’s reporting and what counts. The funding situation is not public. There are vague mentions of Chinese strategic interest in Finnish mobile engineering but nothing confirmed.
The hard problem they haven’t mentioned publicly yet is apps. A new mobile OS in late 2011 without a way to run the things people actually use is a phone you return after a week. Nokia’s own Ovi Store never got close to matching the iOS App Store or the Android Market in depth, and that was Nokia, with Nokia’s brand and Nokia’s reach. A thirty-person startup in Helsinki doesn’t have a better answer to that problem just by existing. They need an Android compatibility layer or a miracle, and I don’t think miracles are in the Mer Project repo.
I’ll pay attention if they announce actual hardware. Until then this is a press release and some goodwill from people who liked the N9 and are sad Nokia didn’t.
Update June 2026: They did announce hardware. The OS got named Sailfish at a Helsinki conference in November 2012. The first Jolla Phone shipped in November 2013. The Android compatibility layer landed too, which was the correct answer to the problem I flagged here. A tablet nearly killed the company in 2015. By 2017 Jolla had stopped making hardware and started licensing the OS. And in 2026, Commodore picked Sailfish over Android for the Callback flip phone.