Sailfish operating system, which is based on Nokia’s abandoned Meego operating system and claims to have great multitasking capability, will soon be introduced in India. A spokesperson of Zopo Mobile, a Chinese player which recently entered India, said to The Mobile Indian, “The company is working on a Sailfish operating system based handset and will soon introduce it in the market.” The operating system is said to provide better multitasking than existing smartphones.
While unveiling the software development kit, the company said that the operating system features effortless multitasking, allowing users to switch between running applications directly from the home screen, ending a call or pausing a song without having to enter the application. You can have a look at how the operating system will work in this video.
Another unique feature of Sailfish is the removal of elements that often take up some of your smartphone screen’s real-estate. Instead of displaying the battery life and signal indicators, the developer has moved them to the lockscreen, allowing you to maximise the screen space.
The new platform will work with most Android applications and therefore there will be no dearth of applications on it. The OS also works on the QT application development framework of Nokia (which is used for developing apps for the Symbian platform). While the Zopo spokesperson did not elaborate on the phone’s specifications, it is expected to get very high end specifications, and is likely to feature ST-Ericsson’s latest NovaThor platform (CPU), and probably a quad core version of the platform that was announced recently. Sailfish operating system is based on Meego operating system, which was jointly developed by Nokia, Intel and Linux, and was later abandoned by Nokia in favour of Windows Phone OS. The operating system was resurrected by erstwhile Nokia employees who were working on Meego.
They have formed an independent Finnish software development company Jolla and recently showcased the operating system, which is meant to be used on a wide range of devices including smartphones, tablets, smart televisions and even automobiles. The OS will not just compete with well established OSs like Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry, but also with developing operating systems like Firefox, Tizen and Ubuntu. Unlike Tizen, Firefox, and Ubuntu, Jolla’s Sailfish is focused on the premium segment aimed more at the people who would buy an Apple device rather than low end Android, and therefore the pricing of this handset is expected to be in the mid range Android category, only because Zopo itself is a low cost brand.