Jolla may not be a household name, but for more than a decade, the Finnish company has positioned its Linux-based Sailfish OS as an alternative to the mobile software duopoly that is Google's Android and Apple's iOS.
Now, 13 years since it tried to cut through the market with the Jolla Phone—a device which remarkably received software updates through 2020—it's back with a successor of the same name.
This time, the company is positioning its handset as the “European phone.” This bit of marketing caters to the growing distrust in US digital services and platforms that has arisen since Big Tech sidled up to the second Trump administration.
The new Jolla Phone (pronounced “Yolla”) costs 649 euros, mimics the Scandinavian design of the original, and has already secured more than 10,000 preorders since its preview in December 2025. Those preorders are expected to begin shipping at the end of June. At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona this week, the company divulged more details about the phone's hardware.
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Jolla has had a turbulent history. After the company floundered the launch of its Jolla Tablet in 2015, it nearly went bankrupt and pivoted to licensing Sailfish OS to automotive companies and governments, including Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine, Jolla had to cut ties with Russia, and a corporate restructuring meant that Jolla's assets were acquired by the company's former management under a new company called “Jollyboys Ltd.”
The new Jolla Phone. Courtesy of Jolla
It got back into the smartphone game in 2024 with the Jolla C2 Community Phone, made in collaboration with a local Turkish company, and it was this experience that gave Jolla the courage to jump back into the hardware business with the new Jolla Phone. Unlike the C2, this device is completely assembled in Salo, Finland, where Nokia phones were manufactured more than a decade ago.
“Europeans want more European technology,” Sami Pienimäki, CEO of Jolla Mobile, tells WIRED. “People want to go away from Big Tech, and the other trend is that European people want sovereign tech—it makes it possible for our kind of company to have a position in the market.”
Building a smartphone from scratch was also much harder over a decade ago, but today, Pienimäki says the operation can be fairly lean without having to “pay too much upfront.”
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