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Jolla is first phone with new Sailfish OS, out this year for £340

The Jolla is the first phone running Sailfish, the open-source operating system from the people who tried to get MeeGo going.

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The first phone running Sailfish, the open-source operating system from the people who tried to get MeeGo going, is the Jolla, it'll cost you €399 (£340) and it's coming by the end of the year.

Jolla -- pronounced 'yo-la', not 'joller' or 'holler' -- is the name of the phone and the Finnish company that makes it. It has a 4.5-inch screen, a dual-core chip, 16GB of storage expandable via microSD, 4G, an 8-megapixel camera and a battery you can replace yourself.

Sailfish is "Android app compliant", which hints you'll be able to install standard Android apps on it. Jolla hasn't explained what this means in practice, but it sounds like you'll be able to sideload apps from Google Play, and that it'll be very easy for Android developers to translate their wares to Sailfish.

"It's a question of agreeing with whoever the partners are that the user can download the application from 'app store X'," Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimäki told our sister site ZDNet. "There are quite a lot of stores where we can get Android."

If you plop down €100 (£85) for a pre-order, you'll help fund the mobile's production and bag an exclusive "OtherHalf", a cool custom case that changes the phone's user interface.

"When you put these two halves together, it also changes the look and feel on the software side," said Pienimäki. "There's a chip on the OtherHalf and when you put that on the phone it affects the software side of the device. That's why we avoid calling it a cover."

Here's Jolla's launch video [warning: LOUD]:

Open-source mobile operating systems are all the rage, with Ubuntu and Firefox looking to nibble a little of Android's gargantuan market share. Sailfish is yet another, and is hoping its pre-Windows Phone Nokia heritage will help it stand out from the crowd.

The core people at Jolla were behind the Nokia N9, a beautiful piece of kit that didn't get the support its fans thought it deserved, after Nokia signed up with Microsoft to make Windows Phones. We know from reader comments that Nokia diehards can be a vociferous bunch, but it remains to be seen if their passion translates into a big enough fanbase to support a new company.

Nevertheless, Sailfish's interface looked very slick in the preview video Jolla released last year, with a swipe-to-preview your homescreen feature that in hindsight is slightly reminiscent of BlackBerry 10's 'peek' ability.

Will you be pre-ordering the Jolla? What do you think of Sailfish? Does it stand a chance? Holler back in the comments, or on our jolly Facebook page.

Update 3pm: Added quotes from Pienimäki.