Up close with an Android alternative: Jolla's Sailfish OS tablet (pictures)

Holler at the Jolla Tablet. After its super-successful crowdfunding campaign where it achieved its $380,000 goal in just 2 hours, the Jolla Tablet is nearly ready to ship out to its backers.

It runs Sailfish OS, rather than Android, which promises to have better multitasking and uses gesture controls to make navigation swift and simple.

After the first batches reach the crowdfunding backers, the tablet will finally go on general release globally, via Jolla's website, with a price of $249, which converts to around £160 or AU$320.

Here's the tablet's home screen. It's actually a grid of your recently used apps, allowing you easily multitask between them. The apps still show live information so you don't need to fire them up to find out what's going on.

Although it doesn't run Android, it can run various Android apps.

Big names like Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, Skype and WhatsApp are available for Sailfish.

This screen shows all your notifications, as well as upcoming calendar appointments.

It's also an easy way to access key settings.

The lock screen shows notifications from your apps, unless you have a PIN code set of course.

It's not super-stylish, but I've certainly seen worse looking tablets.

It's pretty slim too, at only 8.3mm thick.

There's a 5-megapixel camera on the back.