The budget of the mobile system from the Finnish startup Jolla is already more than 200 million euros, the company’s executive director Jussi Hurmola said in an interview with the Talouselama portal.
According to him, Jolla is currently building a mobile alliance based in Hong Kong. The core of the future union will be the Sailfish operating system, built on the basis of MeeGo. A number of investors have already invested in this alliance. As a result, Jolla had 200 million euros at its disposal.
“We have just raised enough funds to form an alliance and develop a final product that can be licensed,” says Khurmula.
The names of the alliance members and the main investors of the project are not reported at the moment. It is only known that among them there are well-known vendors, as well as manufacturers of microchips and mobile operators. Already in the middle of 2013, the company plans to transfer the finished system to its partners. It will be open: every player in the market will be able to refine the system, freely integrate services and applications into it.
Jolla considers Chinese as the main market for itself. As we have already written, DPhone, one of the top Chinese distributors, has already agreed to distribute Sailfish-based smartphones.
Developers are going to present a working version of the platform itself without reference to a specific device by the end of this year.
UPDATE: According to a Wall Street Journal publication, the first device on this platform will be announced next month.