Nordic Startup News Early Stage Startup News From The Nordics
The iconic computer brand returns to phones with the Commodore Callback 8020, built on Jolla’s Sailfish OS — a quiet alliance of two names that shape computing history. Two pieces of computing history just came together. Commodore — the brand behind the best-selling computer of all time — is returning to the phone market with the Commodore Callback 8020, a flip phone designed to help people disconnect. And it runs on Sailfish OS, the European operating system built by Jolla on the Nokia MeeGo lineage.
Jolla is a Finnish technology company founded in 2011 by former Nokia engineers building on the MeeGo operating system. The company has developed the Sailfish OS operating system for over a decade, offering a European alternative to the market dominated by Big Tech giants. Jolla launched its first smartphone in 2013.
This is a unique union: the company that brought computing into millions of homes in the 1980s, and the only independent European mobile operating system, Sailfish OS, together building a phone for people who want their attention, their privacy, and their data back.
The Commodore Callback 8020 is built for calm — a phone that lets people step away from endless feeds and notifications, while still doing what they need. Commodore chose Sailfish OS for exactly the qualities that make it different from the dominant platforms: privacy by design, no Big Tech surveillance, and a distinctive, human design language.
How the partnership came about is itself a small story.
“The Commodore team went through all the alternatives and then they found Jolla’s Sailfish OS and loved the design and the privacy in it,” said Sami Pienimäki, CEO and co-founder of Jolla. “Peri approached me, and here we are: launching an iconic phone, with an iconic brand, on an iconic OS — and an amazing, growing community behind it. Who would have thought.”
For Commodore, the choice was about building something that serves people rather than exploits them.
“The Commodore Callback is designed as an antidote for the damage that modern ‘always-on’ culture has wreaked on us, and that antidote doesn’t end with our commitment to blocking social media and browsers at the system level,” said Peri Fractic, President & CEO, Commodore. “Privacy has been trodden on and exploited all too often in the last 20 years. With the Commodore Callback, your data stays yours. And in Jolla, we’ve found a partner that understands our vision for safer personal technology and has already built the ideal OS to power it.”
Both brands share a lineage and a conviction: that technology should give people control, not take it. Commodore was the first company to democratize the era of personal computing through thoughtful design and accessible pricing; Sailfish OS carries forward the European mobile engineering tradition that began at Nokia. Together, the Commodore Callback 8020 offers people a genuine choice — over their data, their privacy, and what their phone exposes them to.
Jolla and Commodore will showcase the partnership on July 8, 2026 in Helsinki, where Jolla also starts to ship its awaited European smartphone, the new Jolla Phone.
