Back in Fall 2014, Finland-based, Jolla, launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise $380,000 for its new self-titled tablet. The unique tablet has been dubbed by the company as the world’s “first crowdsource tablet” to surface. Following the project’s success, Jolla returned to the global crowdfunding platform once again for the tablet with a new 64GB version.
The Jolla Tablet’s Sailfish OS is declared as an operating system that no one has ever experienced. It is independent and has been built the way it has. The company noted, “It’s our company policy that we’ll never sell or share your data with anyone. There are no back doors or anything third parties could use for monitoring your activity. Together with the open source community, we’re continuing to strengthen our privacy capabilities at every opportunity.”
Unfortunately, things haven’t been going financially well for Jolla, which is apparently leaving some backers without their tablets. While the company successfully shipped a small amount of tablets in October, in a new year’s message, it revealed some bad news:
“The serious financing challenge in November-December had unfortunately a bigger impact on this project than we could even anticipate. Now that our financial situation has improved and we are slowly starting to get back to the normal operations, we are actively planning the best way to finalize the project and to find a solution that fits to both all you dear Jolla Tablet contributors and to our future business plans, together with our investors.
“We don’t have all pieces of the puzzle figured out just yet, but a few things are now certain: we are happy to say that we will be shipping an additional small batch of the Jolla Tablet to early backers during early 2016, targeting to send invitations during January. The bad news here is that we are not able to complete the production to fulfill all contributions. In other words, all of our backers will not get a Jolla Tablet. However, you can be sure you will not end up empty handed. We might even have some positive surprises in stock for you. But more on that will follow, feel free to speculate!”
Despite being unable to provide every backer with a tablet, the company still remains optimistic of the new year:
“Year 2016 is definitely going to be a year of growth for Jolla in many ways. As said, we now need to get the operations running efficiently again to support all the current and upcoming customers of Sailfish OS, and also to answer to the needs of all new business partners. Next year we are looking to scale Sailfish OS into new levels through new partnerships – recently we have had a huge increase in the interest towards Sailfish OS licensing from different kinds of device vendors.
“We are sure that the year 2016 will very interesting and successful for Jolla and Sailfish OS after such a challenging and stormy year as this one. Let’s make 2016 a great year for Jolla and Sailfish OS – together!”
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