[Forbes’ Ewan Spence: 24H With The Jolla Smartphone
Oludare Padilla
We inferred technical and design inspiration help from an existing smartwatch OS called Asteroid OS, led by Florent Revest, which shares a lot of the same core Mer and Nemo libraries with Sailfish OS, and goes to show how important and valuable support from the open source community is for us. Compatibility layer libHybris gives us quick access to existing Android hardware, and prototyping features is a breeze on top of the high-level QML APIs to the home screen, connectivity, profiles, power management, display, clock, calendar, weather and settings backends also powering features running on Sailfish OS smartphones. In addition Sailfish UI layer provides a toolkit of scalable common components, gestures, layouts, animations, icons, fonts and localization enablers for creating fluid and beautiful user experience.
Fitness and health tracking is arguably the most important feature in the current generation of wearables. In the fitness view you can track your daily activity levels. Tapping a progress circle turns the watch into a dedicated step or a calorie counter. With more time it could be extended to comprehensive health suite.
The watch is paired with Sailfish smartphone, which forwards calls and message notifications to the watch. User gets notified with a gentle vibration on the wrist, can quickly glance incoming events, easily dismiss incoming calls with a simple gesture, or transfer the call to his/her hands-free. In the prototype the connectivity is routed through WLAN as the low-power Bluetooth would have required a bit more porting time.
Device configuration and user preferences should automatically be transferred from the smartphone, but we implemented time and date settings as a proof-of-concept to see how easy it is to port traditional Sailfish views to a small screen. In a productized version the date picker of course would naturally be redesigned, but the ported one was already surprisingly usable.
A final note related to Sailfish OS / Jolla products: if you are a Sailfish community member or a just a fan, you can be sure that we will continue to push for new Sailfish devices for our community. More info about that in the near future!
Great news. I am not particularly interested in smartwatches, but I would really get one of these if this port became available.
Now, what about OFFICIALLY porting SFOS to selected third-party mobile phones and selling a license, including Alien Dalvik support?
Regarding the Russian case I just have to declare that we do not have any political interactions with Russia when it comes to Sailfish OS and its assets. This is solely a business deal and does not decrease Sailfish OS independence in any way.
The best thing about this development is that it does not lose the essence of de jolla gestures, it is as if the phone on screen reduced, you do not miss anything about the sailfish philosophy.
Should try to try to put something like maruos, but instead of doing it with debian should associate with soluos, since it shares the same boat
Maybe you should do a case study on how to build a time machine with sailfish and then travel back in time to prevent the whole Indie go go campain. I do not understand how you can go on and keep supporting your company after what they have done.
We are talking of a contract manufacturing. Jolla starts manufacturing / ordering from (sub)contractors just after a critical load is achieved. Not any intermediaries are involved, all commerce happens direct from Jolla Store.
When shall the SFOS come? Please putkeen a questionaire in your pages, so we can show our interest in the SFOS (name + email). When the smart watch will be available, we will receive an instant message of that.
I think the ambiences are getting too much attention, both on this watch and on the phone. It is wasteful to use one of the few available global interaction patterns for that. Add a settings shortcut in the events view, and use swipe from top to display the shortcuts which are currently only available from the lock screen (or a superset of these).
Can you release system images or a how to on how you guys did this and let the community take over building a smartwatch. Sailfish smartwatch looks like what I was expecting from a smartwatch. Android wear just comes up short and Asteroid is too Alpha.
When shall the SFOS smart watch come? Please put a questionaire in your pages, so we can show our interest towards the SFOS smart watch (name + email). When the smart watch will be available, we will receive an instant message of that. This could be very practical and simple.
795a8134c1