Gigaom Interview With Jussi Hurmola

Jussi has been doing the rounds it would seem (is there something in the air?) and Gigaom conducted another recent interview with Jolla’s CEO of which there are some excerpts below for discussion.

Please visit Gigaom for the original interview in full.

It’s MeeGo with our own interface, and nice new features and functionality. We can talk about these when we come out with the product, but we want to get away from that [standard user experience of] opening and closing applications. That is a five-year-old design pattern and user experience. We want to go further. They’re pretty individualistic machines these days, smartphones. We want to be the phone that handles messaging, calendars and so on in an inclusive way, so you can have concepts like the family in the device.

We’re also talking about using the MeeGo software in other devices — not just Jolla. We want to make as big a wave as possible.

In the above quote from the interview, Jussi reiterates what he has spoken of before about a new system of getting away from ‘opening and closing applications’.  While this is fairly cryptic, it sounds like he is talking of more integration. For example, you have your regular apps: weather; social; music etc deeply integrated and rather than opening or closing, these are just constantly running and updating in the background or something along these lines maybe?

Further to my wild speculations post, he also reaffirms being open to other manufacturers (Hello Nokia? ) using the MeeGo software.

 We’re open to cobranding. On the software part, we’re working with other businesses to bring non-Jolla devices, MeeGo-based devices. I can’t say with whom at the moment. For example – and we’re not saying this is what will happen – ‘Vodafone powered by Jolla’, or ‘Jolla by Louis Vuitton’, or some internet service powered by Jolla. It’s a bit dangerous to talk about it. It’s not information I can disclose now.

With the comment above he further expands on this point.  <(dreams)> I really hope they team up with UK community driven network, GiffGaff,  which IMO would be the perfect partner for an open source mobile phone manufacturer like Jolla fitting well with their community driven themes.

We’re going to announce the smartphone later this year. When we announce it, we’ll also say when you can buy it. We’re setting up an ecosystem. You can’t do a smartphone without supporting developers, services, navigation — we are setting all that up.

The reaffirmation in the interview that a device will be announced soon (at least by the end of the year), is the most exciting news of course and we here are on tenterhooks with anticipation….