Jolla says no to official Sailfish OS port for Nokia N9

Recently, Jolla unveiled its Sailfish OS. This opened new possibilities for devices such as the Nokia N9. According to a tweet by Jolla, though, the N9 will not get an official port of the Sailfish OS.

When a user asked Jolla over Twitter if there is a port of the operating system for the Nokia N9, Jolla replied: "We cannot support Nokia's product officially. Technically there is nothing preventing for porting to eg. N9." While this does put a stop to the possibility of an official port, there is nothing stopping developers who have time on their hands to port the OS to the N9. At this point, the N9 is currently supported by developers in general, as the official developers of the phone had dropped support.

No official port of Sailfish OS to the N9

Fan developers of the Nokia N9 are more-or-less what is keeping the phone afloat. Back in August, developers had ported Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to the device. The developers released a video showing that some of the features of the Jelly Bean port work. Though it is unclear exactly what bugs the device may have while running the latest version of Android, it might be stable enough in the near future to use as a daily driver. The developers for Android raise a puzzling question against OEMs like HTC and Samsung: Why does it take so long to update a phone to the latest version of Android?

Earlier this year, we had reported that the N9 was successfully running a build of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. From the videos at the time, it seemed that this “ROM” was a bit glitchy and, as expected, didn’t work in the alpha phase of the ROM's functions like the Camera and Wi-Fi. Things that worked were: the ability to dual boot and choose the OS after powering on the device, 3D drivers, Open GL, rotation, touchscreen, headset buttons, USB networking, LCD off in sleep mode, Alarm, Mounting of "My Docs" as SD Card, software video decoding, network registration, i.e., phone calls, SMS, Data (GPRS/ EDGE/ 3G), Bluetooth and charging, but without any notifications of how much battery has already been charged.

The Nokia N9 has a 3.9-inch AMOLED screen running at a resolution of 480 x 854, giving the phone a pixel density of 251ppi. The phone runs on a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor and has 1GB of RAM, powered by a PowerVR SGX530 GPU. The N9 sports an 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Optics.

On the connectivity side, the Nokia N9 has support for Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n. The phone also supports HSDPA speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps. The phone has Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and NFC capabilities. The phone is the last Nokia device to run MeeGo.