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Jolla had previously pegged the second half of this year for its debut device launch. Today it has confirmed to TechCrunch that this launch timeframe is not changing, despite its intention to show the phone next month. It provided the following emailed statement confirming the pre-sales campaign and noting that the shipping timeframe remains the same:
{ Jolla will showcase its first device in May. The exact timing of the introduction will be announced later. A pre-sales campaign is expected to start after mid-May. The campaign is currently being planned and further details will be available at the time of the product introduction. The sales start of the first Jolla device will take place during the second half of 2013 as earlier announced.
The pre-sales campaign was reported earlier in Finnish publication digitoday, which ran an interview with Jolla chairman Antti Saarnio. According to the interview (translated from the Finnish by Google translate), the pre-sales campaign will be a “Kickstarter-style” crowdfunding campaign, whereby early backers can expect to get a device with a few special extras compared to buyers who pile in later }
Jolla told TechCrunch via Twitter that the pre-sales campaign is not a crowdfunding campaign to fund the initial production run, rather it’s a “pre-sales is for the fans to sign up their interest and make sure they get the device first”. However the distinction between a pre-sales campaign for fans and a crowdfunding campaign to fund production is a minimal one, and mostly a difference of emphasis.
In its interview with digitoday, Saarnio apparently talks about taking “advance payments” and “pre-payments” from fans who register to buy the device — payments that “will not be so great as to constitute a threshold for the fans” but will be tiered, allowing them to get a more “tailored” phone, the more they pay.
Jolla has not, however, confirmed this down payments detail separately to TechCrunch. Its statement suggests it is still finalising plans for the pre-sales campaign.
The pre-sales campaign is clearly part of Jolla’s marketing and community-building efforts to spread the word about Sailfish and build momentum behind it. But taking down payments ahead of production would also make sense for a startup with limited resources to build hardware and one that is competing in such as fiercely competitive space, against smartphone makers with such huge resources.
