Expected, but still insanely cool: Canonical has just announced Ubuntu for phones. This is a new mobile phone operating system, with its own user interface and development platform. It's built around Qt5 and QML, and the interface reminds me of MeeGo on the N9. It's supposed to be on the shelves in early 2014, but the developer preview is out today.
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Member since:2005-11-29
I'm not sure I like the idea of magically turning my phone into a full blown desktop OS. It's great theory, but no one has really done it well yet.
Motorola failed, completely, and embarrassingly with their Atrix. It screams more of a gimmick than anything else. ASUS is the same with their PadFone.
I do think there is promise in connected devices and continuous clients, but only through the lens of cloud computing and synchronization.
Kinda like being able to start a movie on Netflix on my PS3 and continue it on my Surface from their Netflix app.
Or editing something in OneNote on my Lumia and opening the app on Windows 8 and having it pick up exactly where I was. (Note: This isn't currently do-able, but its an example of the type of scenarios I envision).
These type of scenarios are much richer and there is much less friction on the hardware side.
The phone spec war also worries me because it comes at the cost of battery life. These superphones can barely get through a day. Multicore is only worth it if your tooling is up to snuff to eek out every ounce of performance.
Member since:2009-06-20
Member since:2005-07-22
What happend when you lose your phone or have it stolen?
If it is your laptop repacement then you are in deep doo-doo.
Please don't say 'keep everything of value in the cloud'.
You will probably have setup the phone/laptop replacement to loging you your 'cloud' storage at startup. How secure is that? Yes people will do this despite being told that it is not good prectice. There is nowt as dumb as folk.
Then there is the Data cost while roaming. you will really need deep pockets to fund this sort of thing.
for me this is a total non starter but I suppose that there are some 'fans' out there who will leap on this with gusto.
I also think that Canonical is trying to do too many things at once. IMHO, they don't have the resources to do all of this properly. There are so many quality control issues with each Ubuntu release that I have to wonder why they want to open themselves up to even more flak from users.
Member since:2007-09-22
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Member since:
2006-01-04
The next lineup of superphones with A15 cores and Kepler(-like) GPUs and 2 GB of RAM is all 95% of people need to get all their computing done. If you can connect those easily to tablets, monitors, TVs etc it will one device/OS for everything.
By 2014 those specs will be quite cheap. I see no performance problems for Ubuntu.