[kogepathic]

Hard no on giving Jolla a cent. Jolla rug-pulled [1] people who crowd-funded [2] their tablet in 2014.

Jolla used the crowd-funding campaign to butter up VCs for their next funding round [3] and then decided the Asian LLC handling the crowdfunding would go bankrupt, leaving backers with no tablets and most with no refund. [4]

The real kicker was that the tablets were ALREADY manufactured by their ODM, Jolla just never paid them. Took backers money and stiffed their manufacturing partner too. For a while after the campaign folded you could buy Jolla branded tablets (running Android, it was just an ODM model they flashed Sailfish on) on eBay or Taobao [5]. I just checked and there's a Jolla Tablet listed on eBay right now. [6]

10 years later, it looks like they're trying the same thing. Maybe they think the internet has forgotten, but I have zero interest in supporting their next hardware rug-pull endeavour.

[1] https://together.jolla.com/question/97695/information-regard...

[2] https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/jolla/jolla-tablet-wor...

[3] https://jolla.com/content/uploads/2017/02/46_JOLLATABLET_STR...

[4] https://blog.jolla.com/second_phase_refund/

[5] https://old.reddit.com/r/Jolla/comments/3x2s7e/jolla_tablets...

[6] https://archive.ph/Ncf17

[mariusor]

As someone that's contributed to the Jolla tablet foundraiser, I mostly got refunded when they canceled it. It took a long time, it was not directly the money I contributed, but I wasn't left with nothing, and I don't feel like I've been cheated. YMMV, of course, it sounds like you're talking from experience.

[pessimizer]

> leaving backers with no tablets and most with no refund.

I'm pretty sure we eventually all got refunds after they got the Russian cash. My refund came a couple years later iirc, with a check for half the amount coming a few months before the check for the second half.

[0rzech]

AFAIR, I got refunded the whole tablet price in the end - I think half the price immediately, and the other half a few years later. It doesn't mean others were refunded too, of course. It was long time ago, though, so I may have mixed something up.

[Paianni]

afaik the tablet was in development hell for much of 2015, by the time it was ready it was no longer profitable and Jolla couldn't afford to buy more than about 600 units without going bust.

[m4rtink]

IIRC they were negotiating a startup funding round that failed, so they ended unexpectedly up not having enough money to run the company let alone pay for the tablet manufacturing. Even remember hearing about the manufacturers selling the units with Android by the time they secured at least some funding for the company, so there was really nothing to salvage.

Or it might have just been their excuse back then - if you have some newer details of how it actually all went down with the tablet, please do share! :-)

[Paianni]

I know that the specification changed multiple times prior to launch (mostly screen related I think).

[m4rtink]

I remember they had success with a prototype on I think Mobile World Congress, even winning some price. But when they wanted to start manufacturing the screen was EoL and they had to redesign the board for a different screen. This forward pushed the delivery date, resulting in the new manufacturing start coinciding with the funding round failure.