> Having tried it twice, the gestures are completely alien to a new user.
When you buy a Jolla device, you are taken through a tutorial. The gestures aren’t that difficult to get used to. To me personally, they seem a lot more straightforward and intuitive than my wife’s Android phone.
Incidentally, this winter I traveled in a couple of developing countries and bought local SIM cards from an office of the main telecom concerns of these countries. Both times when I said I wanted to use 3G data, the clerks grabbed my Jolla from me and tried to get to where they thought the settings menu was by repeatedly mashing where the Android back button would be. When I said it wasn’t an Android phone, it was like they simply couldn’t absorb that information, they just started mashing harder. That really underscored for me just how much of a mobile monoculture the world is. (The clerks probably could have found their way around an iPhone, too, but I didn’t see many of them in this region.)
There's a, not insurmountable, learning curve for both Sailfish and Ubuntu Touch.
Quirky isn't necessarily better if you're trying to woo users who just want a familiar experience without learning new paradigms.
The lack of a back button in Firefox OS annoyed me! Instead of pressing a section at the bottom right of the screen with one's thumb, one had to 'click' on a web toolbar button all the way near the top left of the screen.
It's not that "gestures aren’t that difficult to get used to", it is more do they offer anything more than the tried and true?
I got a LineageOS/OnePlus 3T a couple months while having a Jolla before and I still miss the possibility to go from a full-screen app to a closed app. It appears the only option is to go the the drawer/recent app things and then swipe right there whereas before I could simply swipe from the top and immediately close it.
When you buy a Jolla device, you are taken through a tutorial. The gestures aren’t that difficult to get used to. To me personally, they seem a lot more straightforward and intuitive than my wife’s Android phone.
Incidentally, this winter I traveled in a couple of developing countries and bought local SIM cards from an office of the main telecom concerns of these countries. Both times when I said I wanted to use 3G data, the clerks grabbed my Jolla from me and tried to get to where they thought the settings menu was by repeatedly mashing where the Android back button would be. When I said it wasn’t an Android phone, it was like they simply couldn’t absorb that information, they just started mashing harder. That really underscored for me just how much of a mobile monoculture the world is. (The clerks probably could have found their way around an iPhone, too, but I didn’t see many of them in this region.)