Gadgetory

80% of smartphone users are carrying around a product dominated by one company's agenda that's a quote from Yolo co-founder mark Dillon and it's those kind of broad sides that have drawn privacy lovers from all around the world to the Yola brand today those sailors get a close peek at the next device to carry the Yola name I'm Michael Fisher with PocketNow here in Barcelona with a quick look at the new Yola tablet while technically the star of today's press conference was the Yola tablet itself really the bigger focus was put on sale fish the company's open-source operating system many of its core interface principles remain unchanged from the Yola phone we reviewed over a year ago software buttons have largely been eliminated in favor of swipe gestures the homescreen is a blank canvas for active app cards and there's a focus on clean minimalistic design with the upgrade to version 2.0 sailfish looks and feels better than ever and it seems especially at home blown up to the nearly 8 inch screen size of the tablet but the real news here is that sailfish is now open for licensing to OEMs and yola's business partners meaning it has a chance of seeing wider adoption and greater penetration and a wider customer base is exactly what Yoli needs if it's dream of becoming the private and secure alternative to Android is to come true speaking of Android let's get back to the hardware the Ola tablet can run Android apps natively within sailfish 2.0 as Dillon puts it it ships with 0 Android in the box but you can have Android apps if you do want them further Yola claims the performance and responsiveness of these apps won't suffer despite running on an on Google device and it also promises a slicker multitasking experience as a result of sail fish's card based design part of that workload will fall to the 64-bit Intel Atom processor and it's two gigs of RAM and users will be able to choose between 32 gigs of on-board storage or up to 128 gigs of microSD expansion for their onboard media in the hand the tablet feels sleek and lightweight it's just a bit larger and heavier than the iPad Mini 2 and its style is minimalist without being dull the 7.85 inch IPS display kicks out a pixel density of 330 PPI and the on-board radio provides support for Wi-Fi a/b/g/n on both primary bands no AC support as of yet and no cellular either whether this tablet holds up as a commercial product remains to be seen it won't ship until the second quarter but the pricing of the world's first crowdsource tablet is certainly attractive early contributors to the company's IndieGoGo campaign were able to get in for less than 200 bucks and the tablets final retail price is expected to fall around the $249 mark but even those prices won't convince everyone to consider a tablet that falls so far outside the mainstream even if it was designed specifically to do so it's easy to get behind yola's promises that it will never sell a user data especially in the modern era of rampant data aggregation in the name of profit but in the end before anything else the Yola tablet will have to be a solid tablet if its creator wants it to move in significant numbers and we'll see just how good a product it is when we review it in the coming months be sure to check out our 2013 video on the Yola smartphone in the early days of Sailfish and also see our full news coverage from the biggest show in Mobile at pocketnow.com till next time i'm michael fisher captain to phones on twitter with anton Dino and Jaime Rivera on production stay tuned for much more from Barcelona as MWC 2015 rolls on