Experiences with Jolla

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Got the phone 2013-12-12, below some experiences. Disclaimer: I own a Nokia N9, and I'm a big fan of its swipe UI.

Bugs/problems

• Setting up accounts (especially Google and Facebook) which had 2-factor authentication in use was an horrible experience
  • It seemed that after waiting for a while in the web view where the auth flow is happening, the web view crashed/the operation was cancelled/something else - anyway, setup flow was interrupted and I was required to start it over. Extremely irritating experience, especially since I tend to have fairly complex passwords in these services.
• The fact that Exchange plugin doesn't show any kind of errors if auth fails is bad. But apparently this is a known bug.
• Yandex store issues, registration didn't work since (i) phone number wasn't accepted and finally because (ii) captcha couldn't be shown because of missing network connection apparently.
• Phone language defines automatically used number formats (e.g. units in Maps app). More fine-grained settings needed here, preferred language !== my locale.
• Data connection seems to hop between mobile network and WiFi randomly, even though WiFi is available. Might be some temporary issue, though.
• About apps
  • There seems to be no solution to get Foursquare working - big minus for me personally
  • Also, no proper Twitter solution: Android-based browsers and official Twitter app became veeery slow when browsing the feed further, built-in browser too buggy and slow at times.
• Browser
  • The UI doesn't feel "right": the control bar seems bit, eh, tacky UI-wise, and handling the tabs, navigating to a new page and doing a new search feels difficult (at least in the beginning, I guess I'll get used to it). The address bar is accessible only when a page is loading, so seems that when on a page X, handiest way to get to a new page or doing a search is to tap the refresh button and then the appearing address bar, after which I can do what I want.
• Tapping notification messages doesn't seem to do anything (at least in cases where I've tried)
  • For instance, after a transfer/download is complete, tapping the notification should open the Transfer section in settings (and does it really make sense to have it as a part of the Settings?) or after installing an .apk, tapping the notification could bring up the Launcher.
• Battery life poor: 24h, with one short phone call -> ~10% left.
• Don't know what's going on, but phone seems to be using GPS all the time, same with 3G connection even though app shouldn't be using it (and email syncing wasn't in use)

Feature requests

• After locking the device and re-opening it, the previous app is not active, the user it taken to the Home view. This is about the overall paradigm with the three main screen areas, but would feel handy if the device worked with the principle "if an app was active when device was locked, swiping down from lock screen takes user back to that app - and only otherwise to Home".
  • Felt this especially awkward when doing the system update (which consists of different phases) - after the screen was turned off automatically, going back to check the status was tedious.
• "Home-screen web apps", ability to pin web pages/web apps to launcher which then run in their own container.
• Where's the options for adjusting snooze delay time in Clock app's alarms?
• Jolla Store
  • The main page seems quite confusing. The commenting possibility in Store is great, but I'd rather decrease comments' visibility on the main page and bring up the apps more. This current approach might be of course be due to the fact that there's not much apps in the Store yet.
  • Installing apps via swiping left without any additional confirmation tricked me installing apps I didn't want. In practice, I did the swipe because (i) I was looking for more information about the app or (ii) tried to flick through app screenshots, assuming they are arranged as a horizontal rolling list.
  • There's no way to cancel a download/install (wouldn't be needed if the accidental installation didn't happen that easily)
• Calendar app
  • More settings to events please, missing especially the "Private" tickbox

Positive

• Apps
  • The email app is following the good ol' design from N9, all email accounts wrapped to same app
  • Calendar looks nice, a promising first version
• Sync options for Exchange account are also familiar from N9, just a perfect way to adjust the email syncing
• Ambiences
  • They act bit similar to profiles in Symbian phones, which I found useful back in the days. Would love to get more options, though.
  • Visually they look great!
  • Adding them to favourites failed for me at first, I thought starring them would be enough, missed the Save functionality.
• Seems promising that the Roaming setting has "Always ask" option in addition to "Allow always" and "Don't allow" - haven't tested behaviour in roaming scenario though, but I'm positive that the data connection management is better than in other phone OS's. In N9 it was great, hope this approach offers similar kind of experience.
• Hahaa, alarm clock works even when phone is turned off, wonderful surprise!

"alarm clock works even when phone is turned off" Isn't this default in all the phones? :)

@rap1ds Heh, well, unfortunately not. It surely was the default for the S60 and Meego phones, though! To be honest, not sure what's the current overall status regarding this fairly crucial feature, but at least my WP8 and Android devices fail that. In any case, Jolla is able to wake me up even though it turned itself off due to low battery, which is great.