Jolla Tablet

» see jolla.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Crowdfunded hardware asks you to pay a year before the object exists. From Turkey that also meant a customs desk and a shipping estimate attached to a purchase that already had no recourse if the company folded, which is a fair description of why I read the Jolla Tablet campaign as news rather than as an offer. Twenty one thousand people read it as an offer.

Jolla was founded in 2011 by engineers Nokia let go after it picked Windows Phone over MeeGo, the Linux system that had shipped exactly once, in the N9. Sailfish OS was MeeGo carried forward by the same people, and the Jolla phone had already been out a year when the tablet campaign opened on Indiegogo on 19 november 2014. The goal was $380,000. It cleared that in roughly two hours and finished above $2.5 million.

The device itself was specified like a competent midrange tablet rather than a statement, a 7.9 inch screen at 2048 by 1536 with a quad-core Intel Atom behind it. Backers paid $249. The interesting part was never the hardware.

Sailfish was gesture-driven with no home button and no app grid in the android sense, and the pitch underneath it was that a small European company could still ship an independent mobile platform after Nokia had stopped trying. That pitch is what people were actually paying for. Almost none of them received a tablet.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

Manufacturing is where small hardware companies die, and Jolla died there on schedule. The first batch of displays failed quality checks, so a second batch had to be ordered while the contract manufacturer shifted the work between plants. Shipping slipped from mid-2015 into autumn. In november 2015 Jolla filed for debt restructuring in Finland and cut around a hundred jobs, which is not a position from which anybody funds a production run.

~ the actual end ~

121 tablets went out in october 2015 as a logistics test. On 28 january 2016 Jolla posted that it would ship 540 more starting in february and refund everybody else, half of each refund during the first quarter and the other half within a year, attaching the phrase "our financial situation permitting" to a promise about giving money back. TechCrunch confirmed the tablet was dead on 1 february.

Backers spent the following years comparing notes on how much of their refund had arrived. Jolla itself survived in the way companies survive when they stop selling to the public, with Sailfish licensed to governments and corporate fleets instead of shipped to people. The tablet is the part of the story that did not make it out.

~ what carried over ~

The lesson circulated afterward in the wrong form, as a warning about crowdfunding rather than about hardware. Software startups fail quietly and refund nothing because there was nothing to refund. Hardware startups fail in public, with a factory schedule and a list of names who paid in advance, and Jolla had twenty one thousand of those names watching the same blog for two years.

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