"We don't push pre-loaded apps." -- Jolla

One Cool Thing

• Robin shares an innovative concept from this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) where Razer unveiled their vision of a truly modular PC design, dubbed Project Christine.
• Henrik rediscover a program called Adobe Bridge, which is a tool for managing your digital assets (photos, videos, sound files...) when working with other Adobe programs such as Photoshop. He then points to some free software that try to do similar things.
• The Internet Infrastructure Foundation in Sweden published a list of "The Year's Biggest Internet Happenings 2013", and Kenneth thinks it is really worth reading it.

Shownotes

The boys are back in town! Wait, no, make that in a space elevator. This time the grand topic is phones and their OS in all sorts. First out is Henrik with his review of the brand new Jolla smartphone from the Finnish company with the same name. Running Sailfish OS, the sucessor to Nokia's MeeGo, Henrik finds that Jolla have developed the swipe based navigation to the better. A bit hard to grasp at first, but given a day or two he started getting into the feel. The app selection in the Jolla Store is during these early times pretty slim but steadily growing. Top that with support of running Android apps and the selection looks promising for the future. Henrik mentions the vibrant and active community of users and developers as one of the most cool things with the phone, seeing updates and improvements every day. The cohesive user interface of Sailfish OS, which is built upon in most apps developed by a third party, makes the phone usage feel solid and unified, says Henrik.

Next up the boys continue to look at a few other phone project which are equally interesting. First out is YotaPhone, a standard smartphone running on Android but with a twist. On the backside you have an e-ink display, which doesn't consume any battery after the text or screen has rendered. Imagine having your train ticket on the phone, but all of a sudden the battery is dead. With having it pushed to the e-ink display, it's still available to use.

Then we have the concept of PhoneBloks, a modular smartphone where every little piece is possible to replace, making it possible to customize a phone to your liking. Don't want a camera, but would love some more battery life? Simply replace and rebuild those phone blocks like your latest LEGO creation (other block toys are available). Focusing on customisation and environment friendlyness (what a waste to throw away your phone simply because the hard drive failed), PhoneBloks is an interesting concept to have a look at.

To wrap up Henrik, Robin and Kenneth take a brief look at Ubuntu Phone and Firefox OS, two strong smartphone OS who both looks like they're going towards a bright future.

Links mentioned in todays show

• Jolla
• Comparison of N9 and Jolla Phone
• Yandex Store
• F-Droid
• Wikipedia: Neonode
• YotaPhone
• PhoneBlocks
• Ubuntu Phone
• Ubuntu for Android
• FirefoxOS
• CNET: Phones @ CES 2014
• Kenneth's shows on Hacker Public Radio (RSS)

Let us wrap this up!

Send your feedback to the group !aiitr at Identi.ca or mark it with hashtag #aiitr at Twitter, you find me at both Identi.ca and Twitter as @AlltInomIT. Henrik you find at @Warpfuz and Robin at @RobinHarming.

Theme music today by Daniel Bautista.
Music is released under Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0.