Mobile Linux Not Just Android: Jolla, WebOS, and Firefox OS News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-13 09:57:51 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-13 09:57:51 UTC
Jolla
The fifth update of Sailfish OS, called Sailfish OS 1.0.5.16 Paarlampi has been released, coming with both interesting new features and bug-fixes.
Hello Jolla Enthusiasts. As you may know, Jolla is a project developed by former Nokia employees. The first Jolla smartphone is running on Sailfish OS, a modified Megoo Linux system, which is Android compatible, uses Wayland as the default display server , uses Nokia N9ââ¬Â²s Maliit touchscreen keyboard and impressive hardware specifications.
WebOS
It is a known fact that Palm’s mobile operating system dubbed webOS never really took off commercially. However, that is no indication that the team behind the OS did not have great ideas. In the latest, the team is rolling out its interesting (read: exciting) user interface ideas to the community. Known as Mochi, the project aims at the community to further work on it as the team was working on some intriguing ideas before HP decided to stall its plan for the same.
A class action lawsuit filed in the wake of that decision in 2011 has now been settled by HP at the cost of $57 million. The plaintiffs are primarily pension funds and other institutional investors, whose anger stems from the dissonance between what HP was saying publicly and planning privately. Citing employees from within HP, the lawsuit alleges that the company didn't have plans to build webOS PCs or printers until at least the beginning of 2013, which would have contradicted its bold claims about flooding the market with webOS hardware.
It’s been almost three years since HP decided to scrap all of its webOS hardware and in that time some of the software has been released as an open source project, and much of the the webOS team has moved to LG to work on televisions.
Firefox OS
Firefox OS 2.0 plans include copy and paste support, a new mechanism for launching apps and switching among them, a more useful lock screen, a find-my phone system, and more. Those features will be crucial to the success of the nascent OS, which lags Android and iOS by years but which is critical to Mozilla's continued relevance.
The images display a new lockscreen, as well as new SMS interfaces and other features. It’s a flatter look, with more transparencies, among other changes. There’s also a view of the EverythingMe-based context-sensitive search function.
Despite the fact that the newest Firefox OS version available on devices is Firefox OS 1.3, a preview of Firefox OS 2.0 is already available and it looks quite awesome, for an OS targeting low-range and mid-range devices.
There have been a lot of interesting developments surrounding Mozilla's Firefox OS platform and smartphones built on it. Mozilla made clear at the recent Mobile World Congress conference that it wants to seed a market for $25 phones based on the platform, putting smartphones in the hands of many people who haven't owned mobile phones before. And, a while back, I covered Geeksphone's concept for a high-end Firefox OS phone called Revolution that would purportedly run both Mozilla's platform and Android. Now, the Geeksphone Revolution, an Android smartphone on which it is easy to install Firefox OS, has gone on sale in France, Germany and the U.K. Some reports say that it will also go on sale in Italy.
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