Jolla's Sailfish tablet shows promise thanks to upgraded OS

Since its inception in 2011, Jolla has bet on the Sailfish OS to differentiate itself from the competition on smartphones and now tablets. Android and iOS may dominate the tablet market, but Jolla's Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign has showed there is an appetite, albeit not very big, for products running other OSes. The company has so far sold about 10,000 tablets after two rounds on Indiegogo, the second of which is still running.

Development on the tablet has come a long way since the product was first announced back in November. Back then it wasn't much more than a mock-up, but at an event on Monday the company showed the tablet running an upgraded version of Sailfish without many glitches.

Version 2.0 of Sailfish has a more streamlined version of the platform's user interface. The home screen still shows icons of running apps, and with a swipe from left to right users can access a screen that aggregates messages and some settings. By swiping from the bottom to the top, a grid with all installed apps appear. To get back to the home screen from an app users just have to swipe from either side. It's a pretty easy concept to grasp even if you haven't used the platform before.

The Wi-Fi-enabled tablet has a 7.85-inch, 1536 x 2048 pixel screen and is powered by a 1.8GHz quad-core processor from Intel. There is also 2GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB of integrated storage that can be expanded using the microSD card slot. On the front, it has a 2-megapixel camera and on the back there is a 5-megapixel camera.

The version with 64GB of storage can be purchased for US$249 via the Indiegogo campaign's second round.

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