Canonical today announces it has signed agreements with mobile device manufacturers bq (Spain) and Meizu (China) to bring Ubuntu smartphones to consumers globally. Canonical is working with these partners to ship the first Ubuntu devices on the latest hardware in 2014. Ubuntu has also received significant support from the world’s biggest carriers, some of which intend to work with OEM partners to bring phones to market this year.
Good news for Canonical.
Ubuntu isn’t my favorite flavor of desktop linux these days, but they seem to be more committed to mobile ( read non laptop) devices than the rest. Its a risky bet, but one that has an obvious pay off if it works. I need to give ubuntu another chance on my tablet.
If they can 1.- get phones in the crucial $150 or less sweet spot and 2.- Actually update the things? I can tell you they’ll sell like fricking hotcakes here as many folks are sick and tired of having phones never get updates and just plain consumer unfriendly behavior on the part of the carriers and OEMs.
I know its bad enough in my area I’m making a nice chunk of change on the side just slapping ROMs on phones, here Walmart pushes their StraightTalk Android phones heavily and frankly OOTB they are barely even functional, freezes, crashes, the default ROM is a steaming turd.
If Canonical can hit the sweet spot and actually supports the things? I’ll be happy to push the living hell out of them as well as pick one up myself, really getting tired of the Android BS go round.
I’m not sure I’d agree that the sweet spot for pricing is that low. I think, actually, that firefox screwed themselves over by only focusing on low end hardware. I think the price point for an unsubsidized phone is less than $300. The lower, the better, obviously. I wish I could play with a Moto G to see if its any decent. But an ubuntu version of that would be awesome.
I would never want to own a phone that costs $150, I shutter the thought at what the build quality would be like. $350 is the sweet spot and is more than enough to produce a fantastic phone. I currently use a Nexus 5 phone, hence where the 350 dollar figure came from. In my oppinion and a lot of others it’s the perfect combination of speed, screen resolution/size and weight. Ubuntu will not run properly on crappy $150 hardware, period. You need at least 2GB RAM, 3GB would be preferable, quadcore CPU, like the Qualcomm found in the Nexus 5, HDMI (desktop support), SD Card. Remember, Ubuntu’s vision of Touch also includes the ability to dock your phone and then use it as a full desktop computer. I have installed the Ubuntu Touch preview on a Samsung S2 and the experience was horrid, your $150 phone wouldn’t be anybetter than that, probably worse. So anything less than Nexus 5 hardware and I wouldn’t bother.
Using a pure Android OS like what is found in the Nexus 5 has never been anything but fantastic. I have never had stalls, shutdowns or crashes. It seems to me that you should spend a little more money next time and buy a proper phone if you want to use Android. If you use Android, the Nexus 5 is the perfect option, the pure Android experience is the ONLY way to go, these skins that Samsung, LG, etc. are not only horrible but put’s a cloud of sluggishness over the entire system. If you can’t afford the Nexus 5 than go for Nexus 4. The Samsung SG4 Nexus version is also a good option but very expensive and doesn’t give you much over the Nexus 5.
Edited 2014-02-21 10:58 UTC
You might want to check out Moto G phone and what it offers for its price…
I really like ubuntu overall and I think if they could make those ginormous hard drives reality they’d have a real advantage. Obviously this isn’t the prototype and those specs don’t matter anymore but, yeah still interested.
“Ubuntu puts content and services at the centre of the experience, rather than hiding them behind stores and apps.”
This sentence is gibberish to me.
They could have thrown a couple of “synergy” in there to spice it up.
http://tinyurl.com/ne5ps94
Well, from my early experience with Ubuntu touch on my nexus, they’re talking about having links to buy stuff as part of the launcher. Rather than having to go into the store, browse to the movie section and then searching for the movie you want to buy.
Its a pretty stupid idea, imho. I don’t want to buy a movie on my tablet that often that it should be on the same level of accessibility as my email or calendar. And frankly, the movies I do want to buy will never be the “hot, popular movie” in the launcher.
Glad to see the first Ubuntu phones landing in 2014 rather than later. I’m still quite interested in seeing how well they work. Hope you can do a review.
Has anybody tried Ubuntu Phone? – You can put it on e.g. a Nexus 4 already.
If they only would focus on the Qt Unity Desktop so we can finally get rid of GTK3 for good. Pff wishful thinking i guess.
They had Qt for 2d desktop. Now it’s gone.
Why waste development resources on a 2D framebuffer library when all modern hardware has a 3D GPU sleeping most of the time?
Unity 8 will run on Qt5 and Mir – Qt is the future of Canonical’s GUI development.
QT 2D is gone? That worked great on older hardware, especially Intel cards.
Yup you need to run a unsupported 2011.* ubuntu distro to get the last packages.
Great, I had good luck with that. It actually worked better than Lubuntu for me. Are there any other lightweight, easy distros left?
I kinda assumed the people maintaining the old Qt desktop were reassigned to some new Qt-based project. Ubuntu Mobile, maybe?
Not even Mark can afford to do everything at once.
Buy a Ubuntu phone and realize I have no useful apps for it? Run Android apps on it? No thanks, I’d rather buy another Android phone.
That’s a great way of thinking. If everybody thought like that, we’d still be running DOS.
It has a pretty good suduku app.
I mean that seriously it is the greatest suduku app I’ve ever seen, and as a joke as to the breadth of content that is there.
When I think Ubuntu on a mobile phone, I can barely muster out a “meh.” Some will say innovation. I don’t see that coming from Canonical.
Seems like this project is dead.
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android
Why wasn’t there enough interest for it?
To me, it is the holy grail.