Jolla Tablet: Aiming for Closure

Dear Jolla Tablet supporters  and other Jolla followers,

Happy New Year! Together, let’s make this an ever better one than last. 

In that spirit, we now have answers for those of you who have been waiting for the next Jolla Tablet update – thanks again for your patience. As already stated in our New Year’s post, we plan to ship an additional small batch of Jolla Tablets to early Indiegogo backers. And, for the rest of our backers, we now have a refund process in place – see below for more details.

It has taken a while to get all the details in place and the final decision for the refunding process. Why? Because in addition to planning the tablet refund process, we needed to clarify the company’s overall financial situation moving forward.  

Before going into more detail regarding the refund process, I would like to first revisit the recent history of and what went wrong with the Jolla Tablet project.

Why did the Jolla Tablet project end up in trouble?

After the first two Indiegogo campaigns (in November-December 2014 and February-March 2015) things looked very bright. We realized that the promised shipping schedule was very tight, and we were very confident that we could make it. However, soon after the Indiegogo campaigns, we hit the first obstacles: we experienced severe issues with component deliveries and with the display quality. Still, back in August-September 2015 as we started the pre-order campaign for the Jolla Tablet, we were confident that we could start deliveries according to the revised project schedule. And in October, we shipped the first batch of tablets – 121 units – to ensure that the order and logistics chain worked properly. Everything went smoothly.

To continue, our supplier then had their own issues and had to change factories two times for production, which again affected the schedule. Naturally, project delays also have a severe impact on budgets; it was this cycle of events, which led the project into serious trouble.

To top it all off, we entered into company-wide financial trouble as our financing round was unexpectedly delayed in the late autumn. The initial impact was that we could not pay our subcontractors, which again contributed to more delays. The financing delay resulted in a fight for the survival of our company, not just the Tablet Project.

In December, the long-awaited financing finally arrived, but at that point the company had already been hit hard. In order to continue the Jolla story, we had been forced to apply for debt-restructuring in Finland and had to temporarily lay off a large part of our organization. Despite these challenges we are continuing the story – this was just one death valley we had to pass through. And, we definitely are not yet in the clear, as we now need to rebuild our organization and recover from the hit.

What has made the past months even more stressful for us has been the realization of the amount of distress we might’ve have caused for our Jolla Tablet project supporters. It is one thing to deal with internal challenges, but when they so directly affect our dear Community, the situation becomes nearly unbearable.

Our sincerest thanks to everyone for your support and for taking a chance with us.

Getting Closure for and Resolving the Jolla Tablet Situation

We have been analyzing different alternatives regarding the Jolla Tablet project situation. But no matter how you come at it, the tight financial situation remains a major constraint and therefore a main driver of the solution. Furthermore, due to the delays in the latest financing round it has simply become too late to produce all the tablets for the project. The supplier no longer has the needed components and many of them are no longer available. Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done now to change this.

In light of the above, Jolla intends to do the following:

1. Ship remaining Tablets to Indiegogo backers: we will ship 540 units as soon as we can starting from February. This was already mentioned in Juhani’s New Year’s greeting. We realize that this is  just a small portion and does not help in resolving the overall situation.

2. Refund the remaining Indiegogo contributors: Jolla aims to refund the total contribution, including shipping and all accessories. Due to the financial constraints this will happen in two parts: half of the refund will be done during Q1/2016, and the other half within a year, our financial situation permitting.

The Tablet shipping and refund processes start immediately once all the practicalities are in place. Specific to refunding, we plan to establish and ramp up the refunding process and start refunding during the course of February.

You will be receiving an email with instructions on what to do. Please wait for that, before contacting our service and support team.

Once again, we apologize from the bottom of our hearts for the inconvenience, and, of course, hope for your continued support. 

Your Jolla captain, Antti

Frequently asked questions:

(Updated on Jan 29,2016): 

Q: I ordered the Jolla Tablet directly from the Jolla Shop in the autumn, and not from Indiegogo. What happens to my order? A: As your transaction was a product order, you will be refunded for the total value of the purchase. No action is required from you at this point, you will receive an email confirmation about it.

Q: I contributed on the first day of the Indiegogo campaign. Does this mean I get a tablet? A: There were thousands of contributions done during the first hours of the campaign, and we will make every effort to fulfill according to the order in which contributions were made. You will either get an invite to complete your order based on your contribution or you will receive further instructions on how to get a refund.

(New) Q: If I do not want a refund, and want to donate the money to the future of Jolla. What can I do?  A: We are very happy to receive this question, thanks for the support! If you are an Indiegogo backer, you will be asked to apply for a refund. By simply ignoring this you will be donating the funds to Jolla for its exclusive use. If you are a pre-order customer (August-September 2015) and would like to donate your pre-order payment to Jolla please submit a request here.

Q: What does the future of Sailfish OS look like? A: After the awaited financing came in in December, Jolla has been able to continue the development of Sailfish OS. We are currently receiving significant interest from different mobile industry players to license the operating system. One of the publicly announced projects is the community driven Fairphone project, but there are many other negotiations going on and Sailfish OS is gradually taking steps to become an OS used by multiple device vendors. However, Jolla is still very tight financially and is currently negotiating with its creditors for extended payment terms so that all the available financial resources could be efficiently used to secure the needed OS development.

Q: Why did you use Indiegogo funds for software development? A: There has been a lot of discussion on the Jolla Blog about the allocation of the Indiegogo contributions towards OS development and not the tablet itself. Last year a significant part of the OS development efforts were for the tablet; Sailfish OS 1.0 would not have worked on the tablet and the different HW platform also required a lot work – it was a completely new chipset, requiring completely new hardware adaptation. Jolla Tablet is not a Jolla Tablet without Sailfish OS 2.0. and thus it is natural that a big part of the project was focused on this.

Q: Why are there Jolla Tablets (still) on sale at Taobao in China? A: Jolla as a company has nothing to do with these devices – please note that these devices are primarily not running Sailfish OS, but Android. Furthermore, seeing as these device are not official Jolla devices, they are not covered under Jolla’s warranty terms and conditions.

(NEW) Q: One seller in China says that they will ship Jolla Tablets with Sailfish OS. Can I buy this and receive normal software updates and use the Jolla Store etc.? A: As these are not official Jolla devices, we can’t be sure what changes have been made to HW/SW. These devices might not receive software updates, and Jolla Store might not be used on them.

(NEW) Q: Why can’t Jolla buy these devices back and ship them officially? How many devices are there available in China? A: The approx 500 devices we aim to ship to IGG backers are from the same batch as these devices. Unfortunately the manufacturer had already sold the few hundred devices to resellers before we could get them back.

Q: Was the August-September pre-order campaign built to save the project? Were you in financial trouble already back then? A: No. During the autumn we were still very confident that we could ship the devices according to the new schedule after the unexpected delays.

Q: Why didn’t you communicate more frequently during the campaign? A: We realize now that in the Spring/Summer 2015 we were not that proactive in our communication. We were anticipating  the project to proceed with speed, and aimed at communicating about that next. This was clearly a mistake, we did not communicate proactively enough.

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