Jolla resurrects MeeGo

Nokia N9 smartphone, closeup view of the home screen

Jolla is here. #MeeGo based smartphones will have a bright, new future. Stay tuned!

And with that status update on LinkedIn, a new phone company announced itself, and in the process resurrected the MeeGo operating system that Nokia abandoned as a one-off with the N9.



Jolla is a Finnish company, with Marc Dillon, an 11-year Nokia employee who headed the Maemo / MeeGo program at Nokia, and with him are other veterans of that program. In its own words, from its press release:

Jolla Ltd. is an independent Finland based smartphone product company which continues the excellent work that Nokia started with MeeGo. The Jolla team is formed by directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organisation, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.

Jussi Hurmola, CEO Jolla Ltd.: “Nokia created something wonderful – the world’s best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story.”

Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. Together with international private investors and partners, a new smartphone using this MeeGo based OS will be revealed later this year.

Jolla Ltd. has been developing a new smartphone product and the OS since the end of 2011. The OS has evolved from MeeGo OS using Mer Core and Qt with Jolla technology including its own brand new UI.

The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo’s core engineers and directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo and Linux talent to contribute to the next generation smartphone production. Company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland and has an R&D office in Tampere, Finland.

There’s no website as yet, but if you want to keep track of developments, the place to do so right now is Jolla Mobile’s Twitter account. It has stated that a website for the company is being worked on now, and should go live “soon”.