Gadgetory

as many of you know we unboxed a very special device yesterday at PocketNow and in the past 24 hours we've buried ourselves in all things Yola we've moved into the device we've snapped some photos around town and we've even had a chat with Yola head of software mark dylan and while our intention of having a full review ready in just a three day demo period might have been a little ambitious we do have some first impressions to share after our first 24 hours with the device so let's get to them so that you can get a feel for what it's like to carry the new Sailfish flagship I'm Michael Fisher this is PocketNow and these are our first impressions after a day spent with Yola yola's whole pitch as a company is that it's the alternative to the entrenched brands out there the company's slogan or one of them is we are unlike and that translates directly to the hardware here the division between the front half and the so-called other half the back side is stark in color and it's exaggerated by the deliberately offset curves reminding us that the whole phone actually splits in two and can accommodate specially made modules on the back side snapping one of those modules into the front half will prompt the device to install a special ambiance mode matching the color of the other half a very nice touch that reminds us of what we might see from Motorola's project ara some day but this of course is here now Yola got the jump on everyone now it sounds like EULA is going to encourage outside development so private parties can build their own other half modules on our call mark Dylan told me one of the company's software developers whipped up an extended battery other half in his spare time not a hardware developer a software developer did this in his spare time so hopefully those will prove easy to manufacture and we'll see them hit the open market soon yola's going as fast as they can on that with the standard configuration shown here the device feels interesting in the hand the corners are sharp and the aluminum front contrasts with the plastic back in temperature and tactility making the whole thing well very unlike the branding is very understated with a tiny Yolo logo up top and also a very subtle one on the other half which we missed in our initial unboxing otherwise the device is profound in its minimalism not so minimal yola's operating system sailfish OS is still technically in beta and the company is not in any rush to take that tag off just yet the software has come a long way since our first hands-on at MWC 2013 but the central concept is still the same a vertically oriented series of screens spanning from notifications to active apps to the app library that's pretty easy to get used to and it results in some pretty cool shortcuts like pulling down on the lockscreen to launch the camera or silence the ringer for instance you can also trigger some app functions just by sliding across their cards which is a clever way of getting functionality out of those apps without having to open them but the whole thing is navigated by gestures and while I'm usually all for buttonless control these moves are taking me some time to get used to there's a tutorial to help out of course and I've been back to it a few times but it's gonna take me and I think it would take most people more than 24 hours to master sailfish of course that was the case for webOS and it was the case for BlackBerry 10 and hey this may look a lot like the BlackBerry OS but my initial take is that while it's probably more powerful selfish is less intuitive at least to start with mark Dillon made a pretty good analogy in this respect he said using Yola instead of another smart phone is like driving a manual transmission car instead of an automatic and that's exactly right you feel much more involved with the moment-to-moment operation of Yola but you really do need to pay attention to what you're doing for everything to go smoothly we're going to keep testing our demo unit as extensively as we can but here in the states it's hard to get a good idea of what this phone is really capable of there's almost no local network support on our test unit save for voice and the Yola store isn't exactly bursting with apps yet while the Yandex store has a much broader selection of Android apps which can run on yola's Android runtime it's not the most stable market out there the app tends to crash and so do some of the titles we've downloaded from it the combination of these factors makes it pretty hard to use Yola to its full potential here in America but not all that is the phone's fault and we've got a few more angles to check out before we wrap up the week check back tomorrow for a voice quality reports camera samples and some early thoughts on battery life and thanks for your patience folks as we try to figure out in this very very tight review period whether we will actually be able to generate an official review or whether it will be more like an in-depth feature and less like a reviewable we'll figure it out we will have more Yola coverage for you tomorrow and hopefully some more after that we'll see how long we can hold on to this demo unit this has been michael fisher with PocketNow please drop us a like if you liked the video and leave us a comment below let us know what you want us to cover in what might be our last 24 hours with our review device thanks for watching in the mean time and we'll see you soon