Finnish startup Jolla, creators of the Jolla Tablet, which garnered such great recognition – and funding – on Indiegogo a short while ago, has returned for another round of crowd funding, this time offering a 64GB version of the device and a larger battery.
“After the successful first phase of our Indiegogo campaign in Nov-Dec last year, we’re now moved to the next phase, and continuing our campaign on Indiegogo at least until the end of February 2015,” declares the official Jolla blog. “You now have the opportunity to contribute for the Jolla Tablet and secure your place among the first to receive the unique Sailfish OS Intel-powered tablet with killer specs!”
At this point, there’s nothing new to quell doubts about the viability of the platform, with its non-standard OS, but Jolla at least promises that “by contributing now you’ll receive the Jolla Tablet in the second quarter this year, right after the first contributors. The development work is progressing really well, and we are on schedule to deliver!”
Some other caveats about this new round emerge about “the stretch goal of $1.5M and enabling the support for up to 128GB microSD cards.” As the blog says, “we’ve decided to move forward with an open source memory card solution. This enables you to use memory cards up to 128GB on your Jolla Tablet for back-ups and additional storage, but due to Microsoft’s licensing limitation, cards over 32GB that are formatted in Jolla Tablet will not be readable with Windows computers or devices that advertise microSDXC support (cameras/phones/tablets). We apologise if you were expecting full Microsoft support here, but we feel that this suits best to our community’s wishes and the open source ideology of Jolla.”
Pushing for a new tech goal that carries an inherent limitation seems a slightly counter-productive move for Jolla, but at least they’re being honest about it. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if this round sustains the levels of support that saw them garner $1.2 million in just two days last time. Second fundraising rounds are practically de rigeur in venture capital circles – we’ll see how crowd funding backers feel about them.
