NEW DELHI: Jolla , a Finnish startup born out of a Nokia project designed to help laid-off staff, will soon bring a premium smartphone it developed to India. The launch coincides with Nokia implementing the Bridge Program here, for the employees it let go at a Chennai handset factory Jolla’s phone is expected to be launched in an exclusive partnership with online retailer Snapdeal.com, co-founder and chief marketing officer Sami Pienimaki told ET. He didn’t reveal any expected price. On its website, Jolla sells the phone at ¤349 (about Rs 28,400), taxes extra.The company was founded some years ago by a bunch of former Nokia executives, who were beneficiaries of the Bridge Program. Nokia says it has invested “tens of millions of euros” to run the project in which around 18,000 people have participated worldwide. It conducts awareness and training sessions for former employees to help them secure a new job or start a venture. It has resulted in the creation of 1,000 companies.“We got about 40 engineers into the company (from Nokia) in 2012 which we continued to grow to 110 today,” said Pienimaki. As much as 90% of the people in the company are former Nokia employees.Pienimaki was running a team involved in making handsets on the MeeGo operating system platform at Nokia, before the company ditched the OS and embraced Microsoft’s Windows in early 2011. Nokia sold its mobile handset business to the US software giant in a $7.5 billion deal that closed earlier this year.Nokia’s Chennai plant, which is embroiled in tax disputes, wasn’t transferred to Microsoft as part of the deal. Nokia had about 7,500 employees in Chennai including contract workers, and 95% of them have moved out of the company.At Jolla, MeeGo transformed into Sailfish, an open source operating system. It offers a unique feature, The Other Half, which unlocks different design themes and sounds every time the colour of the back panel is changed. The software allows users to access Android applications, a big advantage when it enters India where the operating system has 90% share of the market.According to Pienimaki, Jolla has timed its India launch perfectly as only 21% of the nation’s 900 million mobile-phone users have smartphones. While this offers big potential for growth in India, in China, where the company plans to go next, smartphone usage is already near the saturation point.Snapdeal’s co-founder and chief executive Kunal Bahl confirmed that the device would be sold on the portal. “Consumers are looking for new things in an otherwise homogeneous market,” he said. “Jolla, being a software and hardware company, can offer a differentiated value proposition.”If Jolla prices the phone in a range of Rs 28,000- Rs 30,000, the smartphone would compete withGoogle's Nexus 5, Samsung’s Galaxy S4, Motorola’s Moto X and Sony Xperia Z1 Compact.Using a Taiwanese manufacturing partner, Jolla hopes, will allow it sell premium smartphones at affordable prices to the pricesensitive Indian consumer.