Have you ever heard about Jolla? In case you didn’t, it makes no sense to spread the news about their new Jolla Sailfish OS tablet before we get our facts straight, especially since we are talking about a new operating system emerging on the market.

Jolla is a Finnish company that started out in 2011 at the initiative of a few former Nokia employees. In November last year, the start – up started selling its first smartphone, powered by the Sailfish operating system. Confident in its success, Jolla made an interesting announcement yesterday on the Slush stage: they are working on a Jolla Sailfish OS tablet. The problem with this announcement is that it came after Nokia revealed its own first tablet on the same stage, the Android-based N1.

In a fast – developing tech world, it cannot be a surprise that a start – up takes its chances with a new product against established companies. It cannot be a surprise to anybody that a start – up wants to directly compete with its “parent” company. In the Jolla Sailfish OS tablet case, the surprise comes from the fact that Jolla wants our money to make the tablet.

The company wishes to raise people’s funds in order to build a Finnish competitor for Android. Thus, they pitched the tablet as a crowd-funding project already available on Indiegogo, with a declared target of $380,000. The good news is that Jolla already reached almost 90% of this target and it has 20 days left until the finish line. You can pre – order the tablet for $189 via the Indiegogo page and expect it to be shipped to you by May 2015.

So what is it with this new operating system? This is a Linux – based operating system that allows the user to see all running apps in a single view and control them via a multitasking view. Besides Sailfish – based apps, the tablet can also run Android apps.

Is this a good tablet, form a tech – specs point of view? The answer is that it isn’t much different from regular tablets you can find on the market: it boasts a 1.8 GHz Quad Core Intel processor, 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of memory, a 5 Megapixel camera and a 7.9 inch display.

Can it compete with the other 400 Android tablets in the world? The Jolla Sailfish OS tablet comes with two major advantages: it is cheaper than most, and definitely cheaper than the one pitched by Nokia, and it is going to be available worldwide, not narrowed down to a single market. The company pushes on the tablet’s novelty, however:

“there are no open-source Sailfish tablets. So this is something different from everything else.”

In the light of these interesting developments, keep your eyes open, as Jolla might become a compelling source of tech news in the immediate future. As a friendly reminder, Jolla didn’t reveal the number of phones it sold, nor some general statistics related to the phone’s success.