Jolla Demos the Sailfish Watch OS by Porting onto a Android Smartwatch

Jolla is a Finland based smartphone manufacturer and also the developer of the Sailfish OS. The company has launched smartphones and tablets running on Sailfish OS, but they never saw much demand from the public. Earlier this year, the company decided to stop concentrating on hardware products as they are left with limited resources. Though the OS lacked any interested from the developer community with very less user base, the only advantage for the Sailfish OS running devices is that they support Android apps along with the native Sailfish apps. It also got few manufacturers like Intex to launch Sailfish OS running smartphones. At the MWC 2016, Intext came up with Aqua Fish smartphone powered by Sailfish 2.0 OS.

The Turing Phone built with Liquidmorphium had announced to come with Android OS but later shifted to Sailfish OS citing the security reasons. However, the biggest achievement for the company is becoming the official OS for the Russian Government. With this announcement, only the Sailfish OS running devices will be used for official and corporate purposes in Russia. The company is also said to be in talks with few other nations for the use of smartphones powered by Sailfish OS. While the Sailfish OS runs on smartphones and tablets, now the company demoed their OS on a smartwatch. The company also clarified that they had no intentions to launch Jolla smartwatch and OS running on the smartwatch is said to be a case study.

This year, no major manufacturers have launched the Android Wear powered smartwatches, while Google has also postponed the release of the Android Wear 2.0 OS to the next year. Jolla developers had tweaked open-source Asteroid OS to run the Sailfish OS on an Android Smartwatch. The UI of the Sailfish Watch OS on the smartwatch looks similar to the Android Wear and Tizen OS with horizontal carousel menu and notification bar. Just like any other smartwatch UI, it also works completely with the swipes and taps. With the increasing restrictions over the Android Wear OS from Google, Huawei is rumored to use the Tizen OS for their upcoming smartwatches.

On the other hand, Moto smartwatches will not see any upgraded variants anytime soon as there isn’t much growth in smartwatch usage. Though Sailfish isn’t focusing on bringing the smartwatch OS, it may consider working on it if few manufacturers agreed to bring it to the market. In the first half of 2016, the company launched the Jolla C smartphone for their community members in limited quantity. On the same basis, we might at least expect the Jolla smartwatch running on Sailfish OS available for their community and developers in the coming months. Stay tuned on Phone Radar for more details!