I backed the Jolla Tablet. I do not have a Jolla Tablet. The Indiegogo campaign opened November 19, 2014. Jolla filed for yrityssaneeraus on November 20, 2015. One day after the one-year mark, I have a reference number in a Finnish restructuring court and a $189 charge on a credit card from last year.
The specs were the problem from the start and I should have seen it. 7.85-inch 2K display, Intel Atom Z3735F, 32GB storage, Sailfish 2.0, all for $189 early backer price. That math doesn’t work unless you’re Amazon running a tablet at a loss to sell Prime subscriptions. Jolla isn’t Amazon. They have maybe fifty employees. The bill of materials on what they promised probably exceeded $189 before you factored in the packaging, the warranty, the logistics, or the cost of a manufacturing partner who’d actually take their order size seriously.
Then the stretch goals kicked in. The 64GB tier apparently needed a different motherboard. Intel started winding down its mobile Atom line mid-year, which complicated the supply chain. The manufacturing partner had problems Jolla didn’t disclose publicly. Delivery slipped from May to July to September. By October the update emails had stopped saying anything that could be held to account. That’s when I knew nothing was coming.
The restructuring is court-supervised debt reorganization, roughly the Finnish equivalent of Chapter 11. Backers are now creditors. Whether we get devices, full refunds, partial refunds, or nothing depends on what assets survive the process and who gets priority. I am not optimistic about full refunds. I am not optimistic about devices. The people who might have manufactured them never shipped them when the money was in Jolla’s account; they’re not going to ship them now.
The strangest part of all this is that the 2013 phone actually worked. That was a straightforward midrange Android-shaped device on standard tooling with a custom OS on top. Jolla could do that. A custom-chassis tablet at razor margins with an Intel mobile chip during an Intel mobile chip supply crisis was a completely different manufacturing problem, and Jolla couldn’t do that. Launching a crowdfunding campaign to fund the product before solving any of those problems was the mistake that put us here.
Sailfish 2.0 shipped on the phone this fall and it’s noticeably better than 1.x. The OS team is not the problem. The OS is not the problem. Whether the company that built it survives the restructuring in a form that can keep shipping the OS is the actual question, and I don’t have the answer.
There’s been reporting since May about Russian government interest in a Sailfish fork for state phones. Finnish press covered meetings with Minister Nikiforov. I don’t know if that materializes into anything. If it does, it keeps the OS alive on someone else’s balance sheet. That’s not the second act I was expecting for a Finnish mobile startup in 2011, but at this point I’ll take “alive” over “dead and elegant.”
Update June 2026: The Russian deal materialized. Kept Jolla running for years, then became its own complicated exit when sanctions hit. The 2017 Sailfish X pivot was the moment Jolla stopped trying to make hardware and started licensing the OS for Sony phones. Sailfish 4 in 2021 was all European government procurement. In 2026 Commodore picked Sailfish for the Callback flip phone. I still don’t have that tablet.