phone review: Jolla Phone Review

FULL REVIEW

Updated: Feb-13-2014 (Sailfish OS 1.0.3.8)

Jan-11-2014: I received my Jolla a month ago, so it's about time to make this blog worth it's name. This time I'm sharing a large, detailed review of Jolla smartphone after a full month of personal user experience. I like this phone a lot, but this time I try to be very objective. The first weeks full of exitement should be over now, so I hope you find a realistic and honest review of Jolla Smartphone here.

Basics: What is a Jolla Smartphone?

Jolla Oy is a fresh new company, founded by a bunch of ex Nokia engineers in 2011. They have developed Jolla phone for two years, and it was finally introduced in Helsinki, Finland Nov-27-2013. The company has developed both the Jolla phone and it's operating system Sailsfish OS, based on Meego (introduced in Nokia N9). Nokia abandoned Meego and its developing team when cooperation with Microsoft started.

The attitude of the Meego team was great already before the beginning. Knowing their job was about to end they still delivered a functional operating system for Nokia N9. The community around the product was supportive, and the team went on with the Meego OpenSource project which goes on under new name Sailsfish OS. Software remains as OpenSource even today, but Jolla has included something of their own to the phone too - the gesture based UI, which is propiertary software, copyrighted by Jolla Oy.

So,we have a new finnish company (HQ in Helsinki, Finland), phone called Jolla [Yol-la] developed in Finland, and a new operating system Sailfish OS running on Linux, which is yet another finnish product by Linus Thorvald. We have a story here, but it's just in the beginning.

Why I write this before I start my review, is that I want my readers to know some backrounds, and that these things matters to how I feel about Jolla. What happened with Nokia, a big finnish story of success, is something I'd love to see Jolla to achieve. About this review, please comment if you find these issues affecting the text too much (or too few).

1. The looks and the feeling. Outside Jolla.

Size: Perfect for my big hand. I'm looking forward for better landscape support for the Sailfish UI, as I've found the size to be nice for two hand writing too.
Hold: TOH surface is quite slippery, and it has gotten even more slippery in a month. I've bought a leather flip case to avoid that. Jolla's corners seems quite sharp, but that hasn't bothered me at all.
Buttons: There are no surface buttons, and just few buttons all together (power, volume only). The buttons feels a bit loose at first, but no change on the feeling after a month gives an idea that they might just hold there nicely.
Front surface: Stylish, buttonless, shiny black. One RGB led changing its color, telling you stuff. Front facing camera of 1,9Mpx is well hidden. Speaker for phone calls. Proximity and ambience light sensors are quite invisible. Very nice touch for finger gestures. No scratches after a month, and I'm not too careful about how I handle the phone.
Back surface: Smooth matte, Jolla logo shining at the bottom but not too visible. Back facing camera of 8Mpx and a flashlight with 12 small LEDs, reaching to 5-8 meters in photography.
The First Half and The Other Half (TOH): At first I wasn't too excited about how the parts are separated. I had a thought that I'm breaking this system... after a month I'm used to it. The halves fits to each other nicely. When removing TOH it bends somewhat a lot, but it seems to handle that well. The perfect fit hasn't shown any changes within a month. The looks how the halves are connected is great - the phone seems like it really has two independent halves. Two sides of each half are rounded, opposite to each other. Overall looks is stylish, but this is just an opinion
USB connection: Located on top is not ideal for me, as when used in a car, the cable doesn't run nicely (unfortunately not all apps understand rotation angle as upside down, which would fix this issue perfectly). Also, the connection port is clearly too wide - all cables I've tried are moving too much sideways when connected. However, no connection problems so far.
Speaker at the bottom: Looking at the bottom of the phone you might think there's a stereo sound, however the right side holes there are for a microphone and only the left side hides a speaker. We have a mono sound. As an audiophile I'd like stereo, but no phone in my ears is an audio device anyway, so this doesn't matter. The sound is loud and clear enough, and if I want any sound quality, I use external speakers either via Bluetooth or the audio plug.
Audio plug: Common 3,5mm, 4 pin plug. I've tested this with several headphones (Sony, Sennheiser, Koss) and a stereo amplifier (Denon), everything is as it should be here.

Outside Jolla scores: 90/100

2. Screen / Display

Resolution might seem low (540x960px is only a quarter of a Full HD resolution), and some pixelation is visible when looking at too close distance. In normal use the resolution is ok.
LCD screen can be viewed in a large angle, but the color tones vary a lot when looked at "corner angles".
Color reproductions is great, but in overall the screen is too cold toned. Too high color temperature (9500K) highlights blue tones, even turning green into blue, which isn't nice when watching photos
In the settings, the adjustment of the screen brightness isn't wide enough. Screen is left too bright in the minimum setting. Switching on the ambience light sensor on makes it dimmer, but in my opinion it's still too bright. In the summer we'll see if it's bright enough in the other end, when using the phone in a bright sunlight.
Compared to some OLED screens, Jolla's LCD drains some more power - and it's never capable to produce real black (as there's always the backlight glowing). However, in overall, I find the screen decent. No need for more in a phone. I've even watched couple of movies from Jolla's screen, and I was quite satisfied with the experience. Will do it again some night.
Screen has a Gorilla glass and it supports 1-5 finger gestures. As said, no scratches so far.

Screen / Display scores: 82/100

3. The Hardware. Inside Jolla.

Hardware is fully detailed here, and compared to some other smartphone models here
My personal opinion on the hardware is that there is enough horsepower on the phone. I've been testing it with multitasking some heavier apps, streaming Full HD media, using 3D graphics. I've managed to crash it sometimes, but not in my normal use. Some personal notes about some other parts, however:
Battery: Fitting steady, and after fixing the NFC bug, this small 2100mAh pack is giving quite unexeptional usage hours compared to its capasity. Do we have a phone on a diet here?
SIM Card slot: Make sure you press your SIM card to the very end. I had connection problems with mobile data, I used some sandpaper to shorten my SIM just a bit (0,1-0,2mm from the front edge). After this the connection has been just fine.
SD Card slot: No connection problems, card is fitting in nicely. Mine is formatted to btrfs.
Sensors: There are five, and all of them are giving nice, steady readings in my tests both in Sailfish and Android environments. Sensors are: Proximity, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, E-compaas and ambience light.
Microphones: Audio quality in phone calls is great to both directions, but audio quality in video recordings is quite awful. Hopefully this is just a software issue. There is also a secondary microphone, used for noise cancellation.
Speakers: Two mono speakers, one for phone calls and one for listening media. Audio quality is great in phone calls and just fine in listening to music.
Qualcomms Snapdragon 400 chip is nice for it's battery wise running, great graphics handling etc.
Internal Storage of 16Gb (13,7Gb usable) is enough, and a common amount of storage in this price group. It can be expanded with max 64Gb SC Card.
RAM, 1Gb isn't too much. Sailfish apps developed by Jolla are quite memory wise, but using 3rd party apps, especially Android apps, will easily get you into situation of runnung low in memory. Even worse, Sailfish itself is using more than half of the memory, and adding the Android compatibility layer (Android Support) leaves only 0,4Gb free for Android apps. It might be enough today, but even bigger apps are beeing developed. However, the memory usage of Sailfish might be just another beta issue, possible to fix with an update.
Camera image sensor seems good in it's accuracy and color reproduction. Propably a Sony. Front facing camera objective is too small, not usable in dark surroundings. Back facing camera takes good photos.

Hardware inside Jolla scores 72/100

4. The native Software

First impression: Where's all the software? The phone seemed to miss even basic apps. But quite fast I found out that even those must be downloaded from Jolla store. Ok, Jolla account up and into the store. In my opinion software plays an important part in modern smartphones, so I give this part a large space in my review and detail the pros and cons for each software provided by Jolla the best I can:
Phone (pre-installed): To use the phone you open the app. There are two options in the pulley menu: Dial a number or search a person. Search opens a "People" app view within the phone app which might cause some mixups in the beginning The search in phone app looks alike People app, but the options are not even close to the same. Personally I've found it better to start any contacting (phone caals or messaging) via People app. Answerin phone calls is easy, and can't be done accidentaly. Same with ending a call. However, incoming call can't be cutted - it can only be silenced, and so far without a quick reply message option.
Messaging (pre-installed): Jolla connects SMS, FB, Twitter, Google and XMPP messaging under one app. Pulley menu -> New message opens the people search view, from where you can select one ore multiple receivers for your message. You can even send the same message to person's email and FB etc. at the same time, nice. After accepting the recipients you are returned to writing your message. Switching between People view and Messaging app is very smooth - it almost feels that they are the same app. In the end, it's nice to have an option to check if the person is still online to receive the message in live, and it's nice to have an option to change the message type if not. Simple and handy, full points from me.

MMS messages are not possible yet, but they should be on Jolla's update list
Bug (small one): Search and hiding keyboard disables another search result. Result comes visible when removing just one letter (even a correct one).
One of the best messaging UI's I've seen. Maybe even the best.

People (pre-installed): Totally new UI took some time to learn. What to say after a month... Let's check "Settings > Applications > People" first: It seems that I can sort my contacts by Last Name and show the Last Name first. I assume that if I leve these unselected, it would be the First Name. Ok... Then there's option to import contacts. What I see now is that that I can import them from SIM-card, from a file, from a file or... from a file???. Clicked the last "file". Contacts imported. Hmm... I have no idea what I just imported, if anything. So, the settings still need some tuning. But let's move on to the People app then: There's add and search on the pulley menu. Add has plenty of possible information. I'll do a following test now: Filling up all possible info there is in a Jolla "contact card", and sending it via wmail to Google and Windows Live. Lets see what's received:

Table: Contacts - moving information as a vcard from Jolla phone:

From JOLLA (the sent .VCF file)	To Gmail:	To WIN7:	To Windows Live Mail:	To Outlook web App:
FirstName	ok	ok	not received	not received
LastName	ok	ok	not received	not received
NickName	not received	not received	not received	not received
Company	ok	ok	not received	not received
MiddleName	not received	ok	not received	not received
JobTitle	not received	as ”Own namelike”	not received	not received
PhoneHome	ok	ok	not received	not received
PhoneMobile	ok	ok	not received	not received
PhoneWork	ok	not received	not received	not received
PhoneFax	ok	ok	not received	not received
PhonePager	ok	ok	not received	not received
EmailPersonal	ok	ok	not received	not received
EmailWork	ok	as other email	not received	not received
EmailOther	ok	as other email	not received	not received
AddressHomeCountry	ok	ok	not received	not received
AddressHomeStreet	ok	no scandinavian letters	not received	not received
AddressHomeCity	ok	no scandinavian letters	not received	not received
AddressHomePCode	not tested	not tested	not received	not received
AddressHomePOBox	not tested	not tested	not received	not received
AddressHomeRegion	not tested	not tested	not received	not received
WebsitePersonal	as ”home address”	ok	not received	not received
WebsiteWork	as ”work”	ok	not received	not received
WebsiteOther	as ”other”	not received	not received	not received
DatesBirthday	not received	not received	not received	not received
DatesAnniversary	not received	not received	not received	not received
Image	not received	not received	not received	not received

Ok, not too well supported at all. By this, I'd recommend not to send contact information as vcf files unless there's something fixed - propably within windows mail clients, as google seems to accept the card a lot better.
People search works well. List of matching people is nicely shown. The letter box view, instead, is good only with less contacts in total. Having more, there's quite a scrolling.
Great, great and great: Contacts can be linked, showing only one of them in the people's list. No more problems with different contact names in FB, Google, SIM etc. Online statuses for several accounts are visible in the same view. Information from the linked accounts is gathered to this view. Adding favourites is easy. The layout is nice. Tapping each information brings option to what to do with it. Pulley menu gives good basic options.
Cover of the People app shows your favorite people in an actively changing view. No cover actions this time, so it's just looking nice (depending on how nice your contacts look) ;)

Sailfish Browser (pre-installed): Just too simple. I take this as another beta app which is yet under development. If the existing features wouldn't work as nice as they do, I'd call it even an Alpha stage version. UI is as simple as it gets: Full screen view to a web page, landscape view exists. A footer bar with 5 tap icons (back, fav, tabs, reload, frwd). Gestures are limited to zoom with two fingers, move with swipes and opening links on new tab with hold. When entering text to a html5 form the browser zooms automatically to the input field and the keyboard becomes visible Automatic zooming needs some tuning, it varies a lot in defferent pages. Behind Tabs we have some more options: Pulley menu with closing all tabs, sharing the active page and opening a new tab. In this view we can also see the url where we currently are and each opened tab as a thumb image. Favourites are listed below, giving a scrollable list. No sorting options. This is all there is - so it's easy and simple. Personally I'd love to see more functionality and customization. Some details more:

Beta? Tabs are reloaded every time
Nice: Good html5 support
No support for Adobe Flash content, not in Jolla's plans either (=not coming)
Moving and zooming on page, in my opinion, is fast and smooth
Opening links to a new tab takes a while (hold gesture has a long delay)
Browser is not yet recognized as a mobile browser on several sites.

Settings (pre-installed): Nice, simple UI. Main screen has 0-12 quick icons, either for switching a setting or to open one. I had some mixups with Bluetooth switch, as first I chose the menu icon instead of the switch but I got it changed later. Anyway, nice that those can be chosen by yourself. Back to the settings first page, we also have sliders for brigtness and ringtone volume and a menu, divided to three sections: System Settings, Apps and Accounts. Fast to learn, but sometimes I forget what can be done via these App settings - why are some options not available in the app itself? In here, apps with available settings are highlighted - and there are not many: People, Browser, Messaging, Phone, Email, Camera. Each one have some basic settings. In overall, there's not enough customization options to make my Jolla feel like a personal phone. However, everything is working - app with no bugs we have :)
Camera (pre-installed): Let's take a review to Settings > Apps > Camera first. From there we can select the desired aspect ratio for both cameras, also affecting the resolution. The main camera on back maxes out to 8Mpx in 4:3 resolution, 16:9 is cropped from that giving 6Mpx. Front camera is capable for 1,9Mpx, but it can't be used without a lot of light. Now, moving into the camera app:

Pulley menu is great. Basic options to tap, added with focusing option to manually select the focus point with tapping a n area in the viewfinder screen.
Hold gesture on the screen opens another nice option: You can choose the location for the shutter icon which takes the picture.
Taken photos can be reviewed with a swipe right gesture. It seems like a short link to the gallery, and tapping on the photo enables sharing options. Above the sharing there's a pulley meny to direclty create an ambience from the photo, or just delete it.
The quality of the images is average. In Jolla's screen, especially with flash in use the photos are shown too blue, but in other screens the same photo is quite nicely balanced. Pinch zoom feature and image quality tuning were parts of the latest software update. I give the image quality 7/10 points considering the price of the phone.
Front camera is very bad in dark ambience. Not ideal for video calling, but we can always try to add some light.

Gallery (pre-installed): Main screen is simple, dividing the content to Photos, Videos and Ambiences. As the ambience is the most interesting image related feature on Jolla, I'll consentrate on that. Jolla has saved us some named ambiences here. Each one includes a backround image and an audio selection for sounds. Adding ambience to your favourites brings it to a quick menu, opened with swipe-left/right gesture on the lock screen or on the home screen. In there, it's just a tap away to change your style. But yet in the gallery, we have more options. First of all, any photo can be used as a base for an ambience. Jolla goes through the colors of the photo and chooses one as a text color tone. So far I've seen only good choises, except with greyscale images > the brown is just ugly. After a photo is "ambienced", it's shown both in photos and in the ambiences gallery. Clicking it there bring up some options:

Remove (the photo's are not removed, just the ambience)
Set ambience (take it to use)
Make favourite (tapping the star adds the ambience to the quick change view and enables the audio tones selection list)
Overall tone volume and list of tones (each can be selected separately)

Mail: A buggy beta app, lacking many important features. You can connect several email boxes to it (gmail, exchange, imap/pop) and read your mail ok, but but but:

Attachments - some opens, some show in wrong layout, some doesn't open at all
Choosing from which box to send is difficult: Must go to the box first, so mistakes are very possible. When sending within other apps, no sending box selection at all
Adding attachments works ok from the mail app, but not via some other apps
Sync: Doesn't seem to happen in the selected time interval
Manual sync: Sometimes very quick, sometimes seems to take unbelievable long
Sorting messages: This is good - from pulley menu, you can sort your each box by time, sender, size, status, importance, amount of attachments or subject
Deleting messages: Can be done via hold->delete or via pulley menu: select messages-->tap carbage. Working good
Sync settings: While other accounts have their sync settings in "Settings->Accounts", for imap/pop3 mailboxes you need to go to "Settings->Applications->Email" to select the sync interval. Two places for settings mixes up a bit, especially as they are not changed too often
Overall: UI is ok, but I'm waiting for some updates. Until some, this app isn't too good for using at work

Clock: Simple and nice. Very good UI after learning it. Adjusting time is done via settings, but here's what we can do within the clock app:

Stopwatch: Quick to use. Endless amount of "lap times", scrollable. Pause, Play and Clear. Simple and efficient. 1/100 sec accuracy,
Timer: 1 min - 23h 59 min variance. Great UI (circle model clock) to select the times. Endless amount of timers can be set and run at the same time (scrollable when more than nine). Color changes for running / paused. By the way, when adding a timer, remember to tap to start it (I overboiled my first eggs for not realizing this). Timers and their remaining times are saved in exit. Via hold gesture --> Reset, Edit, Remove. Handy.
Alert: As easy as timer. Endless amount of alerts can be named, weekday-filtered and activated. Alert sound is the same for each (changed via settings or ambience)
Anyway, time is always visible in the lock screen: Easy to check with a double tap when the phone is sleeping, and easy to check via short pull-down pull-up gesture when on home screen.
When minimized, time is shown on the home screen. Clock cover: Shows time and the next activated timers/alerts. Cover actions include adding a new timer / alert. Just perfect. Overall: No changes needed - a very nice clock indeed.

Notes: Inside the app: Add, Remove, Color selection for each note and a sharing option.

Bug: Notes are sent in a .vnt format, but received as .vcf by gmail (not recognized, as vcf is a contact format). When opening the mail on Jolla, clicking the attachment returns: "Contact information imported" - but nothing happens.
App Cover shows either one activated note or 3 latest notes. Cover has action for adding a new note.

Calendar: Buggy app waiting for updates. UI is interesting - I haven't made up my mind if it's good or bad. Default view is month, dates with events are underlined. Months are changed by flicking left and right, week numbers are shown in between. The month view takes half of the screen, at the bottom there's a scrollable list of events for the selected date. I foun out later that clicking the date below the calendar brings you to a day view with hours. Hours are scrollable up&down through dates.

Events can be added only to the phone's default calendar
Bug: Sync for MS Exchange calendar events doesn't follow the chosen schedule
Missing feature: MS Exchange calendar view & sync is limited to your deafault calendar
Missing feature: Google calendars are only for viewing - edits in phone have no effect to the real content on Google account
Missing feature: Calendars can't be named, and their origin is not shown. Due to this, you might have several "Default" calendars, separated only by system selected color.
Missing feature: Week / Working days view.
Missing feature: Side by side calendar view.
The might be more issues - I haven't used this due to the issues already mentioned. For me, a good calendar app is essential - I hope to find one in Jolla strore soon (wink wink)

Maps: Jolla's Maps app uses HERE maps, and knowing its capabilities, map app is obviously still under development. It's missing something, but it might suprise us late.

Location is working great. GPS Lock is fast.
Searching places works great. When found you have options to favourite, get directions, search other closeby results, call by phone, open web site, send email (if provided) and read info. Additionally, you can save the location to yourself with desired name, notes & images. Tapping a location in the map shows also the distance from your last known location.
BUG: Saved images are not shown after opening the place again
Missing feature: Navigation
Looking forward for even more features: Only two finger zooming & one finger moving are provided as gestures on the map. Hold on the map - no event. Hold on your location - no event. Tapping brings the options mentioned above. Pulley menu offers only save/search.
Overall: This might become a great app. HERE maps in general is a great service, developed by Nokia.

Documents: Very simple app for viewing downloaded files. Support for different file types vary - some open great, some have wrong layout, some can't be zoomed enough. Tapping the document opens some options, which are:

Share
Add account (I wonder why this is here too, accounts are added via settings)
Pulley menu: Information (only choise so far)
Swipe left: Contents? (Empty for what I've seen so far)
My overall experience: An app in need of a lot more development

Microsoft Exchange: This app adds support for MS ActiveSync accounts to be used within email, calendar and contacts. Setting up an account is easy, and manual settings are possible too. Everything works quite godd, and this can almost be called a ready app, but there are a few annoying bugs / lacks:

Bug: Sync interval, dates and silent times can be selected - but the sync doesn't seems to follow these too well.
Only one calendar / account is available - any shared calendars from other accounts can't be accessed. However, synching for this one should work in both ways.
Bug: When adding another account, it becomes your defaul email account (from where the mail is sent when not selected). If this one is created with wrong credentials, the mail is stuck in the "Sending" folder. If the whole account is removed, no change - still stuck in the same place, email app showing the removed account as the sender.
Workaround for this bug: All accounts must be removed, and your default Exchange account must be added as the only one / as the last one you add.
Note conserning this bug: All emails sent via other apps, or via the front page of the mail app, are sent from this account.

Calculator: Basic app, works. I haven't used at all, just tested on my friends phone.
Media: Obviously in a beta stage, this app offers basic functionality of a media player but just for music. Activated song can be added to your own playlist via pulley menu which is visible in below. Playlists can be played in their original order or mixed, and with repeat feature. The UI of the media player is similar to other Sailfish apps, but that doesn't quite fit to what we are used to with media players in general. But a nice new add are the App Cover actions - when minimizing the app, the song keeps playing in a cover with options to Pause & Change to the next song direclty from the cover. Overall the media player is ok, I'm looking for a bit more - but this is not on top of my wish list.
Android Support: An app required to run Android apps on Jolla phone. Installing the support means adding a virtual Android OS named "alien-Jolla-bionic" to work on top of Sailfish. It's based on Alien Dalvik by Myriad and it has limited access to your phone. It's ment for running Android apps and it doesn't have full access to all the phone's hardware or Sailfish folders, so some apps are not working as they should. For what I've found out:

Alien Dalvik can't access: Velocity data (needed in navigation to determine direction), Contacts, SMS, Phone, Battery info, CPU features, SD Card, NFC, I2C, Some bluetooth profiles, Volume buttons. There might be more too.
In overall, I'm suprised how well many Android Apps are running - but I'm a bit disappointed for some restrictions. Also, what seems interesting, is that Sailfish can't access any files saved in Android environment, but Android can access some files saved in Sailfish environment, like photos and videos.

Tutorial: Short walkthour app which guides new users to the Sailfish gesture based UI.
Terminal: (Note: app becomes visible only after enabling Developer mode). Nice linux terminal to be used by nerds. What a great, extended virtual keyboard. Highlightings the content / keyboard makes this a bit flashy, but you get used to it. Keyboard can be hidden too.
CSD Tools: (Note: A hidden app for developer use.) Can be started by dialing *#*#310#*#* or via terminal command "csd". This is a simple testing tool for basic hardware functionality of the phone.

Native software provided by Jolla, scores an overall 47/100
This is given including all Beta release problems and existing bugs in version 1.0.3.8. After some bug fixes, especially in the Email, Calendar and Maps applications, the score might be a lot higher.

5. The Gesture based UI

After a month I'm pretty familiar with the new UI, but somehow Sailfish still manages to suprise me in a positive way. The most important actions are intuitive and fast to reach, exept for settings switches. I hope they are moved later, for example to the top of the notifications screen. That's a great screen, opened with swipe-over-bottom from almost anywhere you are. It show the most important notifications, but there would be room for a nice setting bar still. Well, let's not stuck into that - all I really want to say to any new Jolla users is that it might take a while to learn, as it's quite different from any other phone in the market, but after learning, there's someting special. What I'd yet like to improve is that I could just choose where the setting switches are located, what options are in the lock screen pulley menu, and customizing ( or adding some customized) gestures.
Moving around is intuitive. A lot can be done with just one finger, Certainly no need for any surface buttons, I'm learning fast out of those - and already, they feel quite odd when I take an Android phone on hand. Why? Because you must aim to them...

over-the-top-swipe-down closes an app, and on home screen, it closes the screen
over-side-swipe drops an app to the home screen (multitasking view). There's room for nine latest running apps, but more can be running. Android apps must settle with one cover (showing only the latest active app)
over-side-swipe on the lock screen or home screen opens an ambience selection screen.
over-bottom-swipe-up shows the notification screen. Closing with the same gesture.
normal flick gestures up&down moves you from screen to another. Your apps are listed at the lower screens, new one is added when the previous gets full
pull-down (or flick down) on enywhere on the lock screen shows a pulley meny for some basic apps: Settings, Camera, Phone, Silencs mode. I'd love to be able to choose these ones.
flick gestures left & right are used more inside apps. Actions vary.
flick gestures up & down inside an app varies too.
Then we have tapping (entering / selecting / choosing)
and holding (moving things / opening extra menus)
Also, we have plenty of unused opportunities, as the phone supports 1-5 finger gestures.

Active covers: Runnings apps can be seen on the home screen, each in its own, interactive cover (thumb screen). Each cover can have two pre-selected actions. App cover is capable to show a moving image (like a video beeing watched) and support gestures (flicks / pulls within the cover). Tapping the cover brings an app back to foreground, and it's easy to minimize back to the home screen. You can also peek to the home, nice for e.g. checking the time while browsing internet. Active covers are definitely the best feature of Sailfish OS User Interface.

Sailfish OS gesture based user interface scores 93/100

6. The content of the box

For a 399€ phone, I was suprised that the box didn't include more hardware / software. There's the phone and its charger (cheaap looking, unlabeled), too short USB cable, couple of stickers, quick start quide and a warranty note. Box itself looks very nice - I call it The Parfym for Nerds. The pre-installed software and files in the phone includes less than basics. There's no music (not even the first song to test the player), no videos (three are received after the phone is connected to the net and eqipped with TOH) and just a few ambiences (nice selection, thou). What I'd like to find more in a box of a 399€ phone, would be:

A quality headset, even Bluetooth supported
Few screen covers (even that the screen seems to do well, no scratches in a month here)
More media: Music, videos, some other exclusive material
A case / cover with nice, simple material and great looks
Something not seen before. Unlike. (well ok, there was the phone yes...)

The content of the box scores 65/100

7. Some other, minor notes

4G LTE is not yet enabled. It'll be supported nicely here in Finland, but personally I'm in no hurry with this. I didn't have a change to test even 3G yet.
There are minor video rotating problems. Should be easy to fix with an update. (workaround)
In my user experience, after installing Go Launcher EX (an Android launcher app), I feel like I can use two phones within one covers.
The phone was introduced on 27-Nov-2013. After 7 weeks there are now 121 apps in Jolla store. Great majority of these are native Sailfish apps, and the amount is growing fast.
Jolla is also able to run more than 50000 Android Apps perfectly, and even more decently. I'm not going deeper into the Android Support in this review - Sailfish is the important part in a long run.

8. The best and the worst

+5 for the community. They are helping each other and pushing the phone development forward
+4 for Sailfish OS User Interface. Intuitive, and usable even at Beta stage
+3 for Messaging / People Apps. Great, easy way to communicate
+2 for Developer mode and terminal app. Offering an easy road for nerds like me.
+1 for Android Support. I'd give it even more if it supported the hardware better.
- 1 for the maps. It'll get better, but the day is just not yet. Choosing HERE maps was a great choise.
-2 for missing the Lanscape support in UI and several apps. I'm sure this is under work.
-3 for Settings. There should be more options to customize the phone, making it your personal one.
-4 for Email bugs, NFC bug, other major bugs. I wish to see the most important ones to be fixed soon
-5 for Jolla's information policy. "Stay tuned" is not the way to handle every situation. Also, I waited over a month for an answer to my SIM card issue.

9. The value for the money & my overall score

Would I buy another one? Would I recommend this to a friend? With 60-70€ less, or with some better hardware or some quality extra stuff included, yes I would. I see this phone great, bur just slightly overpriced. However, I wasn't paying for just the phone. Becoming a part of this story and joining this community is a value with no price tags given.

As an objective result, with the current price tag, I give Jolla overall score of 82/100

About this score: It's based on 6 section scores in this article, but I'm merciful with beta related scores (missing features), as I see all those to be a part of history some day. In otherwise I tried to be objective and consentrate only to the phone here. There's something to wait for, both in the Jolla as a company and in this Sailfish powered smartphone. An "unlike" community is working with these. So, here's my final valuations: If you'd like to be part of something, still beeing the unlike yourself, I recommend this phone.

10. My personal Jolla

Installed apps:

The Home Screen Quartet: Phone, People, Browser, Settings
Jolla selection: Messages, Email, Maps, Store, Gallery, Clock, Terminal, Camera, Document, Notes, Media, Calendar, Android Support, Yandex (never used)
Jolla community selection: Friends (FB client), Weather, Screenshot, SailSoma, MK Poker Planning, Tethering, GP Results. Thanks for each one!
3rd party selection: GO Launcer EX (review), Gesture Search, Aptoide store, Adobe Flash (Installing guide), Skype, Firefox, Dolphin, Z-DeviceTest, HDR Camera, Simple MP3 Downloader, Sound Volume Booster PRO, Twitter, Navfree (review), Samsung Remote, Plex Media Server (review)