Over the past few weeks Jolla has been running an interesting marketing campaign leading up to the announcement of it’s new Jolla phone, this campaign is titled “the other half” and consists images of 2 complementary items split vertically and joined together, examples include an image of a baseball|glove, toothbrush|toothpaste, violin|bow, the list goes on.

The way the campaign has been designed is very striking, you can see a few notable examples of this below:

ice|skate

shampoo|towels

sauce|chips

With little explanation about how significant this “other half” idea will be to the Jolla phone, there was obviously a lot of buzz around what was to be announced on May the 20th, and I can tell you now that Jolla has not disappointed.

The Jolla Phone

As you can see, Jolla’s first branded phone is sporting a sleek and simple look, black on the front, solid colour on the back, and what a variety of colours there is!

So interchangeable back covers are nothing new, but that’s not all that’s on offer here, what you’re really swapping out here is being called “the other half”.

The other half

When looking closely at the Jolla phone, you can see the hardware deign is split into 2 halves:

The reason for this design decision goes beyond aesthetics, the other half of your phone is said to be more than just a colourful cover for your phone, but it also interacts with the front of the phone in various ways, for example say you pop on a green “other half”, the ambience of your phone updates to have a green feeling to it.

At this point the feature seems a bit gimmicky right? Well according to Mark Dillon (who is the co-founder of Jolla) the functionality of this interaction is limited only by your imagination, for example you might be going to a party and you want more oomph out of the phone’s flash, just swap to your other half that features a bigger flash, or say you don’t like touch screen keyboards, simply switch to your other half that features a slide out hardware keyboard.

It has also been mentioned that data can be stored on an other half, so perhaps an artist releases a new album, they can release an other half styled to promote the new album, and the other half would include a copy of the album, as well as some bonus content, all stored on the colourful cover itself.

While some of these suggestions might sound a bit far fetched (particularly the idea that an album would be released in a  format only compatible with 1 phone, that doesn’t happen to be an iPhone), if Jolla manages to get enough traction this could really redefine the way we think about interacting with our phones.

The phone is set to be released by the end of the year, and the exact hardware specs aren’t decided yet, however if you pre order one you will get the finished product at a reduced price, this can be done over at https://jolla.com/

Do you think Jolla has a chance to break into the wider smartphone market, or is their product fated to remain in the niche market?