If you wear glasses you could try sticking the magnet to those I guess?
Saying so I had one of the original mod mics and it was great while it lasted, but I found the cable was damaged pretty easily which ended up with it in the bin.
They do have a wireless version with its own dongle, decent bit of kit despite the micro USB charging lol.
I wasn't able to read the article, for those who are in the same boat it's copied below. Sorry no images.
Edit: Saw the archived link, mybad 😅
The ‘European’ Jolla Phone Is an Anti-Big-Tech Smartphone
Julian Chokkattu
7 - 9 minutes
Jolla may not be a household name, but for more than a decade the Finnish company has positioned its Linux-based Sailfish OS as an alternative to the mobile software duopoly that is Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
Now, 13 years since it tried to cut through the market with the Jolla Phone—a device which remarkably received software updates through 2020—it's back with a successor of the same name.
This time, the company is positioning its handset as the “European phone.” This bit of marketing caters to the growing distrust in US digital services and platforms that has arisen since Big Tech sidled up to the second Trump administration.
The new Jolla Phone (pronounced “Yolla”) costs €649, mimics the Scandinavian design of the original, and has secured more than 10,000 preorders since its preview in December 2025. Those orders are expected to begin shipping at the end of June. At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona this week, the company divulged more details about the phone's hardware.
Alt Android
Jolla has had a turbulent history. After the company floundered the launch of its Jolla Tablet in 2015, it nearly went bankrupt and pivoted to licensing Sailfish OS to automotive companies and governments, including Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine, Jolla had to cut ties with Russia, and a corporate restructuring meant that Jolla's assets were acquired by the company's former management under a new company called Jollyboys.
Image may contain Electronics Mobile Phone Phone Computer Hardware Hardware Monitor and Screen
The new Jolla Phone.
Courtesy of Jolla
It got back into the smartphone game in 2024 with the Jolla C2 Community Phone, made in collaboration with a local Turkish company, and it was this experience that gave Jolla the courage to jump back into the hardware business with the new Jolla Phone. Unlike the C2, this device is completely assembled in Salo, Finland, where Nokia phones were manufactured more than a decade ago.
“Europeans want more European technology,” Sami Pienimäki, CEO of Jolla Mobile, tells WIRED. “People want to go away from Big Tech, and the other trend is that European people want sovereign tech—it makes it possible for our kind of company to have a position in the market.”
Building a smartphone from scratch was also much harder over a decade ago, but today, Pienimäki says the operation can be fairly lean without having to “pay too much up-front.”
The components are sourced from various vendors and countries. The MediaTek Dimensity 7100 5G chip hails from Taiwan; the 50-megapixel main and 13-megapixel ultrawide camera sensors are from Sony; the 8 or 12 GB of RAM is from SK Hynix in South Korea.
“There are Chinese components as well—we are totally open about it—but the key is that, as we compile the software ourselves and install it in Finland, we protect the integrity of the product,” Pienimäki says.
What makes Sailfish OS unique over competitors like GrapheneOS and e/OS is that it's not based on the Android Open Source Project, but Linux. That means it has no ties to Google—no need for the company to “deGoogle” the software; meaning there's a greater sense of sovereignty over the software (and now the hardware). Still, it's able to run Android apps, though the implementation isn't perfect. Another common criticism is that it's not as secure as options like GrapheneOS, where every app is sandboxed.
There's a good chance some Android apps on Sailfish OS will run into issues, which is why in the startup wizard the phone will ask if you want to install services like MicroG—open source software that can run Google services on devices that don't have the Google Play Store, making it an easier on-ramp for folks coming from traditional smartphones without a technical background. You don't even need to create a Sailfish OS account to use the Jolla Phone.
Jolla’s effort is hardly the first to push the anti–Big Tech narrative. A wave of other hardware and software companies offer a deGoogled experience, whether that’s Murena from France and its e/OS privacy-friendly operating system or the Canadian GrapheneOS, which just announced a partnership with Motorola. At CES earlier this year, the Swiss company Punkt also teamed up with ApostrophyOS to deploy its software on the new MC03 smartphone. Jolla is following a broader European trend of reducing reliance on US companies, like how French officials ditched Zoom for French-made video conference software earlier this year.
Murena CEO and founder Gaël Duval wrote in a statement emailed to WIRED that the company believes it has a different mission from the Jolla Phone as it's trying to bring the existing mobile app ecosystem—minus the permanent data collection by Google and third-party trackers—without a learning curve for the average person. “We want to make privacy possible for the everyday person without the need for technical expertise or a development background,” he says.
The Phone
A common problem with these niche smartphones is that they inevitably end up costing a lot of money for the specs. Take the Light Phone III, for example, a fairly low-tech anti-smartphone that doesn't enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, resulting in an outlandish $699 price. The Jolla Phone is in a similar boat, though the specs-to-value ratio is a little more respectable.
It's powered by a midrange MediaTek Dimensity 7100 5G chip with 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB of storage, plus a microSD card slot and dual-SIM tray. There's a 6.36-inch 1080p AMOLED screen, the two main cameras, and a 32-megapixel selfie shooter. The 5,500-mAh battery cell is fairly large considering the phone's size, though the phone's connectivity is a little dated, stuck with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4.
Uniquely, the Jolla Phone brings back “The Other Half” functional rear covers from the original. These swappable back covers have pogo pins that interface with the phone, allowing people to create unique accessories like a second display on the back of the phone or even a keyboard attachment. There's an Innovation Program where the community can cocreate functional covers together and 3D-print them. And yes, a removable rear cover means the Jolla Phone's battery is user-replaceable.
Pienimäki says that while the device doesn't have FCC approval, you can theoretically import it into the US, and it should work with the major US carriers, though compatibility is rarely a given. Jolla is considering a separate US launch, though right now it's focusing on the European Union, the UK, Norway, and Switzerland.
Antti Saarnio, Jolla Group’s chairperson, reiterates that the Jolla Phone will be a niche product. “Most of the people using Android or iOS will not switch, but we should treat this as a stepping stone for something new,” Saarnio says. The “path to real volume” will come from the mobile market breaking down into new form factors, powered by artificial intelligence.
He's likely referring to Jolla's Mind2, a privacy-focused AI computer, which is still in active development. It plugs into a PC and connects Jolla's AI assistant to apps like email and calendar locally—no cloud access required. The chatbot-like interface lets you ask it questions about your data, whether you're fishing for something from an email or a private message. While the new Jolla Phone won't have any AI capabilities at launch, Saarnio says an integration will be an option users can enable later this year.
Jolla has street cred for supporting its devices for a long time, but we'll have to wait and see how the fresh hardware holds up and just how much the company has polished the Sailfish OS experience, especially since it's much easier today to get started with a deGoogled Android alternative.
You can play it on the original Xbox, there was a leak maybe 2020 of a prerelease / wip.
I should grab some screencaptures of the ingame, but I'm sure there are plenty out there.
We're around $1000.00 AUD for two adults and two 20kg dogs.
Really want to reduce as much as possible however the current pricing in the supermarket is rubbish.
My services are quite small (static website, forgejo and a couple more services) but see no performance issues.
Largest thing for me would be Netflix, if that's at least kept its probably another task to chalk up for me.
From memory lots of streaming services have reduced functionality when running custom roms on phones; but it's been a hot minute since I've done such.
Running 50 on one machine, four on my fileserver and another on a hacked up hp eliteone (no screen) which runs my 3d printer. Believe my immich container is a nspawn under nixos too.
Some are a wip but the majority are in use. Mostly internal services with a couple internet facing, I've got a good backlog of work to do on some with some refactoring my nixos configs for many too 😅.
From my Erying ES system:
Sounds like Amazon's cashierless stores where 'AI' was watching customers add items to their backpacks / baskets and would charge you for the items when you left the store. Turned out 'AI' in this circumstance meant Actually Indians as Amazon were employing people from india to monitor cameras and allocate items to customers.
Not your traditional TVs but look and see if you can get some TVs aimed at venues / advertising. I can see an LG IPS display, 98 inch for sub 10k AUD including shipping (98UM5J-B).
Phillips, LG, Samsung and others offer commercial panels without the rubbish that consumer panels are infected with these days.
This is actually pretty minimal in Australia (as someone who has worked in Hospitality for 20+ years)
Very few venues actually require this to enter, the majority check at the door or once you ae inside the venue.
Edit: Some owners of multiple venues have rolled these systems out in the past that I've seen, generally ones that have seen a rise in patron issues. Its handy that if someone has caused issues in one place they won't get allowed into another; but it's not worth the privacy risk in my eyes.
Yeah the LEDs were always handy to have, and the coloured notifications on the trackball (nexus 1) with a third party app was super cool at the time. My trackball after a few years got pretty dirty and didn't want to clean with chemicals in fear of damaging it.
Currently using a Nothing (3) which is somewhat similar with the small led display on the back.
Nexus one had the trackball, the hero had a sensor or did both? IDK it's been some years since I still had my nexus one. Maybe I'm thinking of the HTC Desire with the sensor.
I do remember running the original version(s) of MIUI on my nexus one, ahh simpler times.
Or Grayjay, I found NewPipe / other frontends had their fair share of issues while I was using them. Their desktop app however I've not used as it was failing to build on my NixOS machines.
USB-C does support analog out (see AAAM) so long as the host device supports / has nessesary hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C#Audio_adapter_accessory_mode
“From the ID 2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions – the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light – below the screen,”
Climate controls are one but sure, five most important functions. Honestly rip out the touch screen, implement buttons just as they had been previously then add the display; preferably with a decent HID as Mazda have done.
I'm still driving a mk6 golf and really can't imagine not having easy access to those features.
Ahh spotted another one!
https://git.galing.org/kel/nixos
Mine is a mess but works for me ¯(ツ)/¯
Permanently Deleted
I'd been a windows user since the DOS / 3.1 days and converted to Linux maybe 2 years ago. I've found that I'm able to tailor the desktop experience (on desktop / laptop) to exactly what I need. No shitware getting in the way or annoying bundled programs.
My laptop has decent battery life and standby gives me no issues, perfect in my eyes.
I can't stand windows anymore, and I'm not one to lash out and buy a macbook to just experience another desktop enviornment / user experience.
Admittedly there isnt any professional use just browsing / games with some codium usage.
By 2010, Merrill had won the right to publicly name himself as the NSL’s recipient. By 2015 he’d beaten the gag order entirely and released the full letter with only the target’s name redacted. But Merrill and the ACLU never got the Supreme Court precedent they wanted from the case. Instead, the Patriot Act itself was amended to reign in NSLs’ unconstitutional powers.
In the meantime, those years of endless bureaucratic legal struggles had left Merrill disillusioned with judicial or even legislative action as a way to protect privacy. Instead, he decided to try a different approach. “The third way to fight surveillance is with technology,” he says. “That was my big realization.”
So, just after Merrill won the legal right to go public with his NSL battle in 2010, he founded the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that shared a name with his old ISP but was instead focused on building free privacy tools and services. The privacy-focused version of Google’s Android OS it would develop, designed to strip out data-tracking tools and use Signal by default for calls and texts, would eventually have close to 100,000 users. It ran servers for anonymous, encrypted instant messaging over the chat protocol XMPP with around 300,000 users. The institute also offered a VPN service and ran servers that comprised part of the volunteer-based Tor anonymity network, tools that Merrill estimates were used by millions.
As he became a cause célèbre and then a standout activist in the digital privacy world over those years, Merrill says he started to become aware of the growing problem of untrustworthy cellular providers in an increasingly phone-dependent world. He’d sometimes come across anti-surveillance hard-liners determined to avoid giving any personal information to cellular carriers, who bought SIM cards with cash and signed up for prepaid plans with false names. Some even avoided cell service altogether, using phones they connected only to Wi-Fi. “Eventually those people never got invites to any parties,” Merrill says.
All these schemes, he knew, were legal enough. So why not a phone company that only collects minimal personal information—or none—from its normal, non-extremist customers? As early as 2019, he had already consulted with lawyers and incorporated Phreeli as a company. He decided on the for-profit startup route after learning that the 501c3 statute can’t apply to a telecom firm. Only last year, he finally raised $5 million, mostly from one angel investor. (Merrill declined to name the person. Naturally, they value their privacy.)
Building a system that could function like a normal phone company—and accept users’ payments like one—without storing virtually any identifying information on those customers presented a distinct challenge. To solve it, Merrill consulted with Zooko Wilcox, one of the creators of Zcash, perhaps the closest thing in the world to actual anonymous cryptocurrency. The Z in Zcash stands for “zero-knowledge proofs,” a relatively new form of crypto system that has allowed Zcash’s users to prove things (like who has paid whom) while keeping all information (like their identities, or even the amount of payments) fully encrypted.
For Phreeli, Wilcox suggested a related but slightly different system: so-called “zero-knowledge access passes.” Wilcox compares the system to people showing their driver’s license at the door of a club. “You’ve got to give your home address to the bouncer,” Wilcox says incredulously. The magical properties of zero knowledge proofs, he says, would allow you to generate an unforgeable crypto credential that proves you’re over 21 and then show that to the doorman without revealing your name, address, or even your age. “A process that previously required identification gets replaced by something that only requires authorization,” Wilcox says. “See the difference?”
The same trick will now let Phreeli users prove they’ve prepaid their phone bill without connecting their name, address, or any payment information to their phone records—even if they pay with a credit card. The result, Merrill says, will be a user experience for most customers that’s not very different from their existing phone carrier, but with a radically different level of data collection.
As for Wilcox, he’s long been one of that small group of privacy zealots who buys his SIM cards in cash with a fake name. But he hopes Phreeli will offer an easier path—not just for people like him, but for normies too.
“I don't know of anybody who's ever offered this credibly before,” says Wilcox. “Not the usual telecom-strip-mining-your-data phone, not a black-hoodie hacker phone, but a privacy-is-normal phone.”
Even so, enough tech companies have pitched privacy as a feature for their commercial product that jaded consumers may not buy into a for-profit telecom like Phreeli purporting to offer anonymity. But the EFF’s Cohn says that Merrill’s track record shows he’s not just using the fight against surveillance as a marketing gimmick to sell something. “Having watched Nick for a long time, it's all a means to an end for him,” she says. “And the end is privacy for everyone.”
Merrill may not like the implications of describing Phreeli as a cellular carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But there’s little doubt that some of the company’s customers will use its privacy protections for crime—just as with every surveillance-resistant tool, from Signal to Tor to briefcases of cash.
Phreeli won’t, at least, offer a platform for spammers and robocallers, Merrill says. Even without knowing users’ identities, he says the company will block that kind of bad behavior by limiting how many calls and texts users are allowed, and banning users who appear to be gaming the system. “If people think this is going to be a safe haven for abusing the phone network, that’s not going to work,” Merrill says.
But some customers of his phone company will, to Merrill’s regret, do bad things, he says—just as they sometimes used to with pay phones, that anonymous, cash-based phone service that once existed on every block of American cities. “You put a quarter in, you didn’t need to identify yourself, and you could call whoever you wanted,” he reminisces. “And 99.9 percent of the time, people weren't doing bad stuff.” The small minority who were, he argues, didn’t justify the involuntary societal slide into the cellular panopticon we all live in today, where a phone call not tied to freely traded data on the caller’s identity is a rare phenomenon.
“The pendulum has swung so far in favor of total information awareness,” says Merrill, using an intelligence term of the Bush administration whose surveillance order set him on this path 21 years ago. “Things that we used to be able to take for granted have slipped through our fingers.”
“Other phone companies are selling an apartment that comes with no curtains—where the windows are incompatible with curtains,” Merrill says. “We’re trying to say, no, curtains are normal. Privacy is normal.”
3/3
Even if users choose the less paranoid side of that spectrum of options, Merrill argues, his company will still be significantly less surveillance-friendly than existing phone companies, which have long represented one of the weakest links in the tech world’s privacy protections. All major US cellular carriers comply, for instance, with law enforcement surveillance orders like “tower dumps” that hand over data to the government on every phone that connected to a particular cell tower during a certain time. They’ve also happily, repeatedly handed over your data to corporate interests: Last year the Federal Communications Commission fined AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile nearly $200 million for selling users’ personal information, including their locations, to data brokers. (AT&T’s fine was later overturned by an appeals court ruling intended to limit the FCC’s enforcement powers.) Many data brokers in turn sell the information to federal agencies, including ICE and other parts of the DHS, offering an all-too-easy end run around restrictions on those agencies’ domestic spying.
Phreeli doesn’t promise to be a surveillance panacea. Even if your cellular carrier isn’t tying your movements to your identity, the operating system of whatever phone you sign up with might be. Even your mobile apps can track you.
But for a startup seeking to be the country’s most privacy-focused mobile carrier, the bar is low. “The goal of this phone company I'm starting is to be more private than the three biggest phone carriers in the US. That’s the promise we’re going to massively overdeliver on,” says Merrill. “I don’t think there’s any way we can mess that up.”
Merrill’s not-entirely-voluntary decision to spend the last 20-plus years as a privacy diehard began with three pages of paper that arrived at his office on a February day in New York in 2004. An FBI agent knocked on the door of his small internet service provider firm called Calyx, headquartered in a warehouse space a block from the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan. When Merrill answered, he found an older man with parted white hair, dressed in a trench coat like a comic book G-man, who handed him an envelope.
Merrill opened it and read the letter while the agent waited. The first and second paragraphs told him he was hereby ordered to hand over virtually all information he possessed for one of his customers, identified by their email address, explaining that this demand was authorized by a law he’d later learn was part of the Patriot Act. The third paragraph informed him he couldn’t tell anyone he’d even received this letter—a gag order.
Then the agent departed without answering any of Merrill’s questions. He was left to decide what to do, entirely alone.
Merrill was struck immediately by the fact that the letter had no signature from a judge. He had in fact been handed a so-called National Security Letter, or NSL, a rarely seen and highly controversial tool of the Bush administration that allowed the FBI to demand information without a warrant, so long as it was related to “national security.”
Calyx’s actual business, since he’d first launched the company in the early ’90s with a bank of modems in the nonfunctional fireplace of a New York apartment, had evolved into hosting the websites of big corporate customers like Mitsubishi and Ikea. But Merrill used that revenue stream to give pro bono or subsidized web hosting to nonprofit clients he supported like the Marijuana Policy Project and Indymedia—and to offer fast internet connections to a few friends and acquaintances like the one named in this surveillance order.
Merrill has never publicly revealed the identity of the NSL's target, and he declined to share it with WIRED. But he knew this particular customer, and he certainly didn’t strike Merrill as a national security threat. If he were, Merrill thought, why not just get a warrant? The customer would later tell Merrill he had in fact been pressured by the FBI to become an informant—and had refused. The bureau, he told Merrill, had then retaliated by putting him on the no-fly list and pressuring employers not to hire him. (The FBI didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the case.)
Merrill immediately decided to risk disobeying the gag order—on pain of what consequences, he had no idea—and called his lawyer, who told him to go to the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, which happened to be one of Calyx’s web-hosting clients. After a few minutes in a cab, Merrill was talking to a young attorney named Jameel Jaffer in the ACLU’s Financial District office. “I wish I could say that we reassured him with our expertise on the NSL statute, but that's not how it went down,” Jaffer says. “We had never seen one of these before.”
Merrill, meanwhile, knew that every lawyer he showed the letter to might represent another count in his impending prosecution. “I was terrified,” he says. “I kind of assumed someone could just come to my place that night, throw a hood over my head, and drag me away.”
Despite his fears, Merrill never complied with the FBI’s letter. Instead, he decided to fight its constitutionality in court, with the help of pro bono representation from the ACLU and later the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. That fight would last 11 years and entirely commandeer his life.
Merrill and his lawyers argued that the NSL represented an unconstitutional search and a violation of his free-speech rights—and they won. But Congress only amended the NSL statute, leaving the provision about its gag order intact, and the legal battle dragged out for years longer. Even after the NSL was rescinded altogether, Merrill continued to fight for the right to talk about its existence. “This was a time when so many people in his position were essentially cowering under their desks. But he felt an obligation as a citizen to speak out about surveillance powers that he thought had gone too far,” says Jaffer, who represented Merrill for the first six years of that courtroom war. “He impressed me with his courage.”
Battling the FBI took over Merrill’s life to the degree that he eventually shut down his ISP for lack of time or will to run the business and instead took a series of IT jobs. “I felt too much weight on my shoulders,” he says. “I was just constantly on the phone with lawyers, and I was scared all the time.”
2/3
Yeah it's a pain to install however. One of our dogs had a chomp on the wife's set, took me quite sometime to disasemble the headphones just to install it.
Honestly if you can get something to wrap over / stitch over the top go that route. The XM4 are fiddily as fuck to tear down just to replace the headband.
Oh those are a clip on version. FML might have to get that to replace the black band on the grey set of headphones.