Ex-Nokia staff led Jolla's phones to be sold in India online

Finnish handset maker Jolla, founded by some ex-Nokia employees, is in talks with partners to sell its smartphones in India, initially by tapping the popular e-commerce route.

"Jolla is now rapidly entering into new markets, and is negotiating with partners in several countries, including Russia, India and Hong Kong where Jolla will open online sales in the near future," the company today said in a statement.

The company has built its own operating system Sailfish which will provide users alternative to Android, Windows, Blackberry and Apple's iOS.

In an interview to PTI earlier, Jolla CEO Tomi Pienimaki had said the company already had orders from India when it started taking pre-bookings for smartphones.

Currently Jolla smartphones are available for orders online at its web shop at the price of Euro 399 to all European Union countries, Switzerland and Norway.

According to CMR's India Mobile Handsets Q3 Market Review, India registered 62.9 million mobile handset shipments for the period July-September, 2013. During the same period, 11.1 million smartphones were shipped in the country.

Launching its first handset in India after a nearly two-year hiatus, Motorola earlier this month made its Moto G available exclusively through e-commerce player Flipkart.

Jolla founders moved out of Nokia after the company, then led by Stephen Elop, decided to dump 'Meego' operating system and instead adopt the Windows platform.

Nokia in mid-2011 had unveiled only one phone-Nokia N9 on Meego in partnership with computer chip giant Intel. Microsoft has now acquired Nokia's mobile devices business.

Currently, Jolla is a team of over 90 people and has offices in Helsinki and Tampere, Finland and Hong Kong, SAR of China. Jolla unveiled its first smartphone for about Rs 34,000 in November and is now expanding globally.

Its Sailfish OS is compatible with devices on which Android OS works. Jolla has started providing Sailfish OS through Android playstore on select devices like Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus and Sony Xperia, for people to experience this new platform.

Soon, the company will provide Sailfish OS downloads from its website as well.

The company has tied up with Tieto Corporation for providing Sailfish OS to handset manufacturers.

In a first, Jolla has announced agreement with F-Secure for mobile security on Sailfish OS.

Jolla and F-Secure are working on an upcoming solution that will provide Jolla smartphone customers gigabytes of cloud storage.

"Jolla and F-Secure want to make sure Jolla phone users have a secure choice to back-up and share their on-device content. We are both very passionate about privacy and security, which is why our cooperation is natural and fruitful," Pienimaki said.

Jolla customers will be able to access stored content from other devices such as tablets, Macs or PCs.