Jolla Announces Sony Xperia Phone Support for Sailfish OS

Finnish Jolla has announced that it is adding support for Xperia devices from Sony to its operating system Sailfish OS. The first phone with the system is the Xperia X, which is on display at MWC in Barcelona.

Jolla says it’s about support for Sony’s Open Devices program, with which it makes software for certain Xperia devices publicly available. Due to the collaboration, the operating system must be usable on Sony devices. It is planned that the first release will be at the end of the second quarter of 2017.

Jolla CEO Antti Saarnio tells TechCrunch that it is important to have a ‘solid hardware partner’ and that it was not feasible for his own organization to develop his own device, because the emphasis is on software. The company therefore sees the Sony devices as a successor to the Jolla C, which it introduced halfway through last year in an edition of a thousand units.

In a second announcement, Jolla said it has signed a deal with a Chinese consortium to release a version of Sailfish OS specifically for China. The consortium, whose participating companies are unknown, will invest $250 million and obtain a license to develop the operating system for applications in smartphones, cars, TVs and IoT devices. According to Saarnio, there are ‘big players’ behind the consortium.