Canonical has announced the first actual Ubuntu phone, which will go on ‘flash sales’ in Europe over the coming days.
The Ubuntu handset can run apps written in either the HTML5 web programming language or its own native QML code.
However, its operating system effectively hides them away. Instead of the traditional smartphone user interface – featuring grids of apps – it uses themed cards that group together different facilities.
Canonical calls these Scopes, and they are reminiscent of the swipe-based card system used by the Google Now personal assistant.
I’m curious about this new approach. It seems a bit cumbersome to me – configuring your own ‘Scopes’ – but I’d love to try it out.
Well, I’m not trying to troll, but this seems a bit less exciting than the previous iteration of the ubuntu phone. Still, hope it does somewhat well, if only because maybe the next iteration will bring back the possibility to use a full-blown ubuntu distro when docked.
Ubuntu phone is a full distro, I think. apt tells me there are 40000+ packages to install and I’ve found all the shell tools I would want to have there.
But yes, the promise of having it as a phone AND a computer is a big part of the allure for me.
Also, as just a phone it suffers from the same thing as all the other newcomers. There’s nothing developed for it. Being able to have it as a lightweight desktop machine might compensate for that. Without it, it is just a nice phone operating system, and we all know how far that gets you.
I’ve been looking forward to getting one of these, having a proper terminal on my phone, being able to use tools like ssh without ads, being able to use apt-get etc.
Seems a shame that it isn’t on one of the other BQ phones or that the Meizu Ubuntu phone isn’t released yet.
Agreed. I got a nexus 5 to try out ubuntu (and sailfish on some nicer hardware than the jolla phone), but it’s not all supported. Camera is the main thing missing.
Wouldn’t that have been an easy way to allow people to try it out? Just get it working on some common, decent hardware? Something that would let people try it and if they didn’t like it, they could fall back to android. That way I’m sure quite a few more would take the step to actually try it out.
This falls somewhere between release early, release often, and the bottom-up approach that lets Android manufacturers become dominant overnight. I have no doubt that if this gains traction, there will be a true Ubuntu phone/desktop hybrid in a couple of years. If it doesn’t gain traction, no harm done, it’s just another cheap phone among many that didn’t do well with its alternate OS.
I think you’d get a better phone for a better price by buying a used Nexus 4 and installing Ubuntu Phone on it.
Running web-as-apps on phones would have been a terrible idea for the entire history of phones, until now. We are on the verge of 3ghz 64bit quad-core phone chips with arbitrary amounts of memory. There has never been a better time to say “no” to native apps unless they’re absolutely required.
Run Hangar on your phone for a while to see what apps you use most often, and decide for yourself if they can be done well in a fast phone browser. https://github.com/corcoran/Hangar
Not everyone has a super fast phone. But everyone will by the time the android alternatives have good native apps!
Still, I can see some obstacles: different life cycle of mobile apps, access to specific hardware (web app handling Bluetooth or compass? – sounds like OS-specific JS API) + impact on battery life. Yes, we’ve got more horse power on mobile but we cannot abuse it due to energy constraints. JS code requires more optimizations than Dalvik bytecode, yet Google has resorted to some form of AOT witk ART despite advances in phone hardware. Likewise MS has moved from .NET-only apps on WP 7 to native ones on WP 8+.
Edited 2015-02-08 21:26 UTC
I would be interested to learn how the battery usage of the popular apps (like Facebook/Twitter/Gmail) compare to that of their websites…..