Jolla says Sailfish OS smartphones sold out, but won't say how many

Finnish startup Jolla said its first production batch of its smartphone running its open-source Sailfish OS has been "fully booked by consumers and selected sales channels." However, the company is not disclosing how many online pre-orders it has booked.

jolla sailfish

Jolla

Citing "customer confidentiality," Jolla is not giving out exact sales numbers. "Although Jolla is not giving out the exact number of devices pre-booked it can be said that the size of the production batch for a mobile device vendor of this size is typically 50,000 units," a Jolla spokesperson told TechCrunch, echoing a line given to other media outlets.

As GigaOM notes, a production run of around 50,000 units is not a bad start for a fledgling smartphone maker, especially compared with the Ubuntu Edge; as of last week Canonical's soon-to-be-concluded crowdfunding drive for the $695 phone received pledges for 14,500 units.

Jolla did confirm that it has received online pre-orders from 136 countries, which is up from June when Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimäki told ZDNet it had orders from 118 countries. Jolla unveiled the smartphone, called "Jolla," in May.

Sailfish, first announced in late 2011, is based on the open-source MeeGo platform, which combined Nokia's (NYSE:NOK) former Maemo platform with Intel's erstwhile Moblin efforts. Jolla has raised $258 million from a variety of telecommunications industry players to launch Sailfish, and it will distribute the OS to device manufacturers free of charge, generating revenue by licensing proprietary software features and from intellectual property rights.

Jolla hopes compete with goliaths like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), BlackBerry (NASDAQ:BBRY) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) in the growing smartphone market. The Jolla smartphone is expected to be available by the end of 2013 depending on the market, and sales will start in Europe with more countries to follow. Those who pre-order will pay no more than €399 (about $533), including applicable taxes in Europe but excluding shipping costs, duties and any local taxes.

The Jolla smartphone sports a 4.5-inch display, a dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel camera, LTE (in certain markets), removable colored casings, 16 GB of memory and a microSD slot. Jolla will be "compliant" with Android apps but it is not clear how many or if consumers will be able to download the apps from Google's Play store. Jolla had announced a chipset deal in November with ST-Ericsson, the joint venture that Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) and STMicroelectronics agreed to shut down in March.

Finnish operator DNA has signed on to sell and market Sailfish smartphones, and Jolla has said that other carrier deals are in the pipeline as well. Jolla has also launched the Sailfish Alliance, which unites OEM and ODM manufacturers, chipset providers, operators, application developers and retailers.

For more:
- see this GigaOM article
- see this TechCrunch article
- see this The Next Web article
- see this ZDNet article

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