There is a reason why Qualcomm has the reputation that they do. They did sell handsets and they produced the chips. They made sure the chips were priced quite high to prevent others from entering in the handset business (this was for CDMA handsets) and if others did, they would still make a lot of money of selling them chips. Eventually Qualcomm had to sell the phone business as cases were being built against them. Jump to 3G technology and Qualcomm did nothing for WCDMAUMTS/HSPA/etc. but they made sure got their patent fees. They wanted nothing to do with it because it competed with their own in-house 3G technology. The fact is WCDMA arrived a year after CDMA did from Qualcomm and Qualcomm tried to squash it. WCDA offered 56kbps whereas the Qualcomm spec offered at most 14.4kbps. If you used the data cable with your phone, you actually connected to a modem in a 3Com modem bank. This was the Qualcomm setup whereas WCDMA you could get 56Kbps and no modem bank was needed. CDMA was based off of the TDMA feature set, not the more modern GSM standard at the time. So CDMA didn’t have features like those found in GSM. On the road to 4G Qualcomm bought several different technologies and some were a strong contender to become the universal 4G technology. The only reason why they went nowhere was because Qualcomm was tied to them. Many major players in the industry know how Qualcomm operates and they want nothing to do with them. Look at how they treated their 3G customers? Sprint and Verizon were locked in a 3.6Mbps for the longest time and the only road for them was 4G which wasn’t available. They also tried to lock carriers into the only upgrade path they had was what Qualcomm offered. Why do you think Sprint and Verizon jumped ship when they could? Better technology, a real roadmap and no technology vendor lock-in.

Once Samsung gets their Exynos 4G chips fully developed, expect them to finally dump Qualcomm for good. That puts the top two handset manufactures not using Qualcomm at all for the main CPU.

The ‘unknown OS’ is exactly the ‘raison d’etre’ for this phone. It’s the first commercially available phone that runs Sailfish OS and serves to prove that it all works. Some people (like many over here) are excited about that.

If you want to get the best phone spec at a specific price point, of course there are other choices. You can choose one of those $250 Chinese Android options that combine a MediaTek Quadcore with a Full HD screen (and that are seriously laggy as a result). Or you can get last year’s HTC One X+ 64GB, running Android 4.2 for only €375 these days. But that’s not the point!

Everyone in the Jolla community is taking a little bit of risk at this stage: the guys and girls at Jolla, the investors, developers and also the first adopters. That was the same with the first iPhone which didn’t even have an app store and was actually rather limited compared to the best Nokia’s at the time (e.g. first iPhone didn’t even have 3G connectivity, which Nokia phones supported since 2004!!!). But look where Apple got with the next models.

So, if you ask yourself that question “why should I pay 400 euros…” that clearly indicates that you’re not really the early adopter type and that you’re really better of looking for a great deal on one of the many other phones already on offer. Meanwhile, I and many others will continue to support Jolla in these early days, because we see value in what they’re trying to achieve. Worst case scenario: I pony up the extra €299 for the device and I’m not very satisfied with it. Well, big deal…