Although the phone runs its own nameserver (connmand, probably) I could not get it to answer queries from my laptop.

8.8.8.8 is a reasonable (or even superior?) alternative.

I did not expect this to be solved so easily and quickly. Underneath its shiny user interface, the Jolla is a completely standard linux system, so with a little Googling, most of the 'sysadmin-like' problems (like this one) should be easily solvable.