Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones | Hacker News Reader

Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

engadget.com

474 pointsblacktulip207 comments

Oh great, another Ubuntu for %s with no shipping devices.

I really wish Canonical would partner with some OEM to actually produce some of these devices instead of just announcing they have software while expecting hardware OEMs to come running. I'd even be happy if they produced a firmware for use on the GN or N4.

Excellent point, they must have strong tie-ups with OEM partners, who can make in-expensive devices, otherwise its not going anywhere.

They may package the distro Cyanogenmod-style.

From the interview on Engadget, it seems they also want to rely on the community to basically make Ubuntu ROM's for Android devices, although their priority is still to partner with OEM's to make new Ubuntu phones.

They'd be relying heavily on other phone designers including display adapters in their phones, which virtually nobody has done so far. Motorola have one model, but I can't remember seeing any others.

I really want to give a "fuck yeah" for using qt as the app backend. I think qt5 is amazing and hope it can really take off. Especially with Necessitas you can port Ubuntu native apps to Android easily, and then porting to the desktop is trivial. I don't think they talked enough about how you can easily write a qt5 app that can run on everything but ios (and even that is seeing some traction).

I wonder how this is going to conflate with their ongoing focus on the desktop towards python + gtk apps. Also, Plasma Active is already targeting mobile and I don't like how once again the GNU stack is fragmenting in approaching mobile into 3 camps (plasma active, gnome, ubuntu).

"I wonder how this is going to conflate with their ongoing focus on the desktop towards python + gtk apps."

Are they?.

IMHO they are making Unity and everything else use Qt. Python could use Qt too.

I had a lot of apps that used gtk, it was ok in the past when the license of Qt was not LGPL, but now I'm porting everything to native and Qt.(luckily I abstracted the UI).

Gtk just has not serious support for OpenGL, mac or Windows.

> Python could use Qt too.

Can. Pyside is very mature for GUI building now. My concern is that the Ubuntu phone OS might not be beefy enough to run a bunch of python interpreters for apps, or that it might not come with one stock.

This announcement baffles me a little bit. An Ubuntu Phone? Why did they choose to announce a phone OS and not a tablet? Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them. Ubuntu is a full featured OS used in creating and consuming long-form content. If they are hoping to engage with existing OEMs I think they would've had a much better time of it with companies like Acer, Asus and other similar desktop makers who are trying to get their foot into the tablet market. Not to mention the added difficulties of dealing with carriers.

They already showed the tablet (Nexus 7 hardware) before.

So the next step is a phone. Since they don't have an OEM partner yet for either might as well announce a phone.

> Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them.

Well that exactly why they picked phone, isn't it. They want a phone to be a light communication device for sending brief messages _and_ also a full fledged OS that can consume long-form content.

I think the reason for that is that they want to target the developing world with low end smartphones primarily. Not everyone will go for a tablet. But everyone needs a phone. The growth is still primarily in phones in the developing world.

>Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them ...

... in 2005. Phones are powerful computing devices, and they are big business.

Yup. Phones are still not as powerful as standard computers, but I would hazard the good ones are at least as fast as a laptop from 5 years ago.

(Guess what OS I was running on my laptops 5 years ago?)

As a data point my newest phone (Nexus 4) is a 1.5 GHz quad-core with 2 GB of RAM and a GPU good for OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.2.

Except for hard drive size and bandwidth, it's the same or better than the dual core laptop I had 5 years ago.

Those specs don't speak to performance. Your 5 year old computer could easily run Windows 8 without a problem and the Nexus 4 can't.

Serious question: What is the use of "running Windows 8" per se? Traditionally, computing platforms are for applications and operating systems are a means to that end.

What class of applications (from 5 years ago) would have inherent performance issues with Nexus4-class hardware (assuming a real external display and hard drive were added)?

Also, it occurs to me that Surface RT is largely Windows 8 and Office running on very comparable hardware. I have a Surface RT, it runs this stuff quite well.

What is the use of "running Windows 8" per se? ... operating systems are a means to [an] end

That's the use. If it runs Windows 8 without complaint, you can generally do the things that running Windows 8 allows you to do.

One could open and close Notepad and Calc all day long and even do some light websurfing with IE with no problem, just to find the system bogs down trying to work with a real productivity app like an IDE, a video editor, or even a spreadsheet.

I think we've all seen a slow desktop before. Windows generally has minimum requirements well below that which you would want to have for serious productivity work. An OS has to leave some RAM and storage space for the user's apps.

This is why when someone says "It runs XYZ!" I presume they mean it runs it well enough that it doesn't get in the way under general usage.

People sometimes take liberties with claims about what runs on what, but generally do follow that guideline.

An operating system IS an application, not a just a means to an end. If you prefer Linux or Windows, that is the application. (Everything else is a microwave, not a computer.)

Those specs edge out the Microsoft Surface RT, which does run Windows 8.

Windows RT*, a little less demanding.

It runs desktop MS Office too. For many people/enterprises that's the gold standard yardstick for "usable PC performance".

The 5 year old computer can easily run Ubuntu and now Mobile phones will, also. What don't you get: this is Canonical running ahead of the pack?

How does running Windows 8 gauge performance of a device?

The phone could have a supercomputer inside it. It's common use-case would like be according to the quote. A small screen and limited keyboard take its toll regardless of computing power.

The big business part is true but tablets also are big and could make some sense as an Ubuntu platform.

Both screen and keyboard are nothing but external accessories. You computer case from 1998 didn't come with an integrated keyboard and display, those were separate. This if (funny enough) a similar situation. You get your phone and then buy a larger case for it that has a flexible OLED display and a bluetooth keyboard. Don't need the large screen and keyboard? Fine just leave those home and take only the phone with you.

Tablets are cool but they can't conveniently become phones, but phones can become tablets/desktop/TVs/ebook reader with appropriate accessories.

The increased processing power of phones will eventually allow many people to replace their PCs with a phone dock. This massive shift of behaviour will have other consequences in how we use our phones. Besides gaming and graphics, the latent processing power when mobile will be used for machine learning and computer vision purposes. These two technologies allow us to harness some incredible power from our devices even with limited inputs.

Imagine having a fully searchable and indexed transcript of your interlingual phone calls available in realtime, and those words are added to your keyboard prediction that is synced with your account. After just getting off a phonecall with your japanese boss about the board of Newmark Industries, you could sit down at a desk and write a document with correct spellings of each board member's names (you are prompted if you would like them added to your contacts). Your phone finds a route to their head office in the background and tells you which specific route to drive there based on historic traffic combined with current traffic (both foot and vehicular traffic, of course).

The sensing capabilities of phones are getting better and better. GPS is getting more accurate and lower powered. Weather prediction is improving due to remote sensing of cellphone barometers. Machine learning and computer vision techniques are improving for augmentation, prediction, and more.

Phones are a big deal. They are the only technological device (besides glasses and watches) that we carry everywhere. Maybe flexible displays will allow us to have phones without the physical limitations that you describe.

Ultimately this leads to my dream of only carrying a phone with all my stuff on,going to work, place it in a dock and start working with the phone as my PC replacement.

My dream too, like this http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-co...

I agree this is the dream. Just one small device with a super-CPU that you carry around and it interfaces with displays all around you. Perhaps with Miracast and Airplay this future is not that far off.

I also can't wait until the day we don't have to charge our mobile devices (solar + kinetic charging in every phone)

Or wireless tesla-coil charging. Or just inductive charging, but put the inductive chargers in desktop and office chairs so that it's a fairly automatic and invisible process.

So what's the difference between having cloud-based accounts and documents that sync between phone, tablet, and desktop? Then you can go to work and without even taking your phone out of your pocket (or even if you forgot it on your bed stand) you can start working with all your same stuff.

I believe Apple looks at the problem this way. Rather than have one piece of hardware act as all devices, they have multiple pieces of hardware that share the needed parts. (Though they haven't finished making it quite as useful as I'd like it to be.)

One of my concerns has been privacy. In this case what I mean is that I don't want Apple or Dropbox or Google or Canonical to own my data in it's cloud. I would probably be satisfied with a solution that only stored encrypted data in the cloud so that those data storage providers could not possibly access my data (so they couldn't be allowed to have my encryption key). I would also be satisfied with a way of hosting a cloud storage platform on my own servers (which would likely be a VPS, so I'd have to encrypt it anyway or else Linode etc. would have my data).

If we go the route of using the phone as the center, then we also need to add the capability into the Linux kernel to connect to external computing resources, like CPUs and GPUs. Then we're not limited to just a "thin client" type of desktop, but could have a full powered one.

> So what's the difference between having cloud-based accounts and documents that sync between phone, tablet, and desktop?

No internet required.

"The network is the computer." Who uses a computer without the internet?

I suppose the same thing is possible using local wifi synching, like how Dropbox shares content over a LAN when it can vs. downloading it from the cloud.

> "The network is the computer."

With the network this bad (cost and performance wise) in US (due to legal and monopolistic reasons, not necessarily technical), that makes a pretty shitty computer. So I would rather have a computer that can be divorced from the network if need be.

You don't need two computers.

But this thing will need two window managers to be useful and applications optimized for touch AND mouse/keyboard. Is rather have two computers. It's not like carrying a phone is a hardship.

I don't care about two window managers (besides, Enlightenment seems to run on phones as well as PCs). Why would you like to carry a second computer when it's not needed anymore!? I don't get that argument..

Exactly. I don't want and can't store work documents on some 3rd party system in the cloud. And my whole point is to have one piece of hardware and not half a dozen. Of course Apple would like you to buy all kinds of hardware instead of one :P

Currently, i am carrying my laptop from and to my workplace and i'd like to get rid of that.

My guess is that the current highend phones already suffice for most of my work. The one part that is missing is virtualization for the occasional VMWare use..

if it runs on android compatible phones it will also run on android compatible tablets.

Maybe if you have an iPhone. My phone is definitely the computing device that gets the most use from me.

A phone is the thing everyone needs. If it isn't a phone, then you need another phone.

Just a web browser capable of showing most popular web sites is quite a demanding application.

Messengers capable of VoIP and/or real time video are computationally demanding.

And these two alone are in high demand. My 512MiB phone is a bit overstretched already just by running the basic phone infrastructure (messaging, calls) + LINE + Whatsapp + browser. I must manually manage background apps and memory daily. Hopefully with 2GiB and better OS memory multitasking and memory management this will be a lesser problem.

Phones are more or less where desktop computers were in the 2000s OS-wise.

I always wished for myself and for the larger web community a 'Rock solid web based Open' Mobile Platform, and the change is happening very fast.

I fell in love with Ubuntu, with the 12.04 Release. Remarkable, well thought user experience. 6 months back, I switched completely to Ubuntu 12.04 and its my primary machine now. I'm blown away with their agile methodologies, love every small part of the web-integration and the Ubuntu software market.

Worth mentioning, Ubuntu Desktop is also strongly emerging as perfect web platform with tight integration with web-services. Many Developers are considering this as a strong open platform(as its web), and have started writing apps for ubuntu software market. So these apps should run seamlessly on Smartphones too.

The concept of HUD to search inside an webapps and navigate complex menu's is revolutionary! Worth mentioning, webapps are now exactly like native desktop apps; I recently used the Gmail webapp, it opens as separate app and we can search inside gmail. (They have an API to enable such HUD controls for any webapp).

All such advancements are only possible today, as we have faster Javascript engines, can leverage Cloud services, access to cheaper hardware and much faster Internet Penetration and adoption than ever before. The web can function as a strong platform by itself and not a hybrid model.

This is a good thing, but having known Canonical and Ubuntu since the start (2004), I would really love to see them succeed in the desktop market first. This initiative will de-focus their efforts. I admire them, and wish them good luck anyway.

"Will de-focus?"

Anyone who was paying attention when they starting shoving Unity down user's throats knew where this was headed years ago.

The desktop market is going away in the consumer space. Unless you're targeting business, it's past the time to become relevant in desktop computing.

Bullshit, people still need to make things. Make emails, edit videos, edit photos, write documents. These aren't business class activities, but touch screens are insufficient for that function.

I don't see people lugging around a laptop anymore, but I easily see people plugging their phone into a display, throwing a bluetooth or usb keyboard + mouse on, and expecting a productivity environment from that device. The hardware has the power to do that now.

I can do that with my Android tablet. If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.

> If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.

Sure you COULD, but serious productivity software is written to make maximal use of input devices. Keyboard shortcut usage is often not optional. That isn't going to translate to a touchscreen, or even a slide-out microkeyboards.

I think you missed the "throwing a bluetooth or usb keyboard + mouse on" part.

Ok. So now how are you putting the screen at a readable distance and angle?

At the point you're carrying around a keyboard anyway, why not just have a Macbook Air?

> At the point you're carrying around a keyboard anyway, why not just have a Macbook Air?

Because you _don't have to_ carry around a keyboard and a display if you don't plan on producing content and just want to make phone calls read ebooks.

Can I tear off the screen and keyboard off a Macbook Air and use it as a phone? No? Well then I want a Ubuntu Phone then.

Well at least in theory ...

Another way to look at it, I already have a TV, a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. As mobile hardware gets faster and better, I would eventually just love to have one device -- a phone. I could connect it to my large screen tv, a good keyboard, a smaller LCD display, USB storage and so on.

I thought it would be great to have one device as well, but then I realized that sometimes I want to use my phone while watching TV or using the laptop, so they can't really be one device, unless I wear a wireless headset, which I don't really want to carry around along with my phone (another thing to charge, another thing to lose).

A multi tasking OS with a powerful CPU and wireless video streaming should provide those at least in theory. There is actually Miracast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracast so in theory the bits and pieces are here already they just have to work as a package.

> edit videos, edit photos, write documents

Canonical doesnt produce video, photo and document editing software. The market's refusal to port that software to Linux has essentially killed it on the desktop for a majority of users. If they dont want to port, there is absolutely nothing Canonical can do about it. A new player cannot simply enter a new market and without effort get a significant part of it.

The only thing they _can_ do is get foothold in a new market first (mobile), then leverage that to get more influence on the desktop. Like Microsoft is leveraging their desktop monopoly to get foothold in mobile.

Well Canonical doesn't produce those things by default they just bundle whatever the latest and greatest open source offering is. Which sucks compared to the professional choices out there on Mac and Windows _but_ is better than what is available on Android OS perhaps.

So in theory this a good move. In practice though, they have a huge mountain to climb. They have to market the hell out o f this and they have to provide a comparable experience to mature and battle tested mobile OSes.

I am all behind them and support them and this phone is probably something I would love as a developer (as I feel like my hands are tied when using Android) but I am afraid this will end up in a very small and irrelevant niche.

First and foremost is to ask so what major cell carrier is going to support this. If the answer is none then well we know the future of this.

> Canonical doesnt produce video, photo and document editing software.

I think, by that argument, Canonical isn't making any software, not even a GNU/Linux distribution. They might not be much involved in developing non-linear video editing software, but they are involved in the various free software projects for everything else on that list?

I actually think this could help their desktop OS become more popular, so I'm excited about it, especially if they don't intend to lock down their bootloaders or allow carriers or manufacturers to mess with it too much.

I just hope they don't start selling them in 2014 with obsolete technologies like the ARMv7 platform and OpenGL ES 2.0. They need to start with the 64 bit ARMv8 and OpenGL ES 3.0 GPU's. Better to start fresh, especially considering they're launching so late.

Yes Apple used the iPhone to sell more Macs after all, it is possible.

If you think this is going to de-focus Canonical's efforts you may be in a bit of denial on what their focus is.

Their focused effort is very clearly to be a player in a tablet/phone "post PC" space. Virtually everything they've done for the past 2 years points to this. If anything, this is proof of the focus of their efforts, you (like many of us) may just not like the path they've decided to go down.

The desktop market is more or less disappearing. On the business end of things, business has no issue paying the paltry sum of what windows + office costs.

I'm not sure what else they can do in the desktop space. IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop and both MS and Ubuntu have taken major missteps.

I also imagine Win8 SP1 will bring back some kind of classic mode. Not sure if Unity will ever be desktop-ified other than running a variant of ubuntu like Kubuntu.

> IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop

I used to agree with this but it has gotten incrementally a lot better in the last couple of releases. I've watched non-geeks figure out how to use it without trouble, and after all the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks.

> it has gotten incrementally a lot better

I keep hearing people say this, I keep trying it again and I keep being disappointed and going back to Xfce.

I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.

Not likely to try desktop Unity a fourth time, no matter how many people say “it's getting better”.

> the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks

Are you sure? Not as long as Linux is something you have to install yourself. Do you use Unity? OS X manages to be approachable to everyone without alienating most geeks/developers.

I'm waiting a few years. I think eventually they'll get it right. With every update, they're slowly fixing and improving things.

I'm using OS X, and I love it. But I think Apple is going to fuck it up eventually, somehow. And hopefully, by then, Ubuntu will be a good choice.

I say this all the time but I'll say it again: Xubuntu, the flavor with Xfce as its desktop environment, has IMHO been an excellent choice for several years now. There's no tablet version but it works well, does what you expect and isn't being messed with constantly like other Linux desktops.

> Do you use Unity?

After much messing around with xfce, gnome-session-fallback and cinnamon, I finally stopped worrying and learned to love the Unity just before upgrading to version 12.10.

> I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.

It's configurable.

> I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.

How else are you going to access the menu with the keyboard?

> The desktop market is more or less disappearing

I think you mean "declining" rather than disappearing.

The last I heard (october news) pc sales were expected to decline by 1% in 2012. If that means "disappearing", that would mean the auto industry has disappeared years ago.

I think Ubuntu is quite successful in the desktop market.

Whenever I see GNU/Linux installation on some desktop or notebook, it's almost always Ubuntu. If people want to switch to some GNU/Linux distribution from Windows or OS X, it's almost always Ubuntu.

So in this respect, I would say they are quite successful.

I've come to conclude (as a home-and-office Linux user for nigh on 15 years now) that the standard Unix gui environment of X + widget toolkits + desktop environment is just too multilayered and complex to work for non-boffins. Too many moving parts that can go subtly wrong.

You can succeed as an end-user Unix, but you have to burn down the gui architecture and start over.

Apple ditched X. Android ditched X. But no "desktop Linux" offering has yet completely ditched the legacy junk. You'd need that (and good OEM relationships) to succeed.

What' s the architecture of this Ubuntu phone gui? Is it gtk and X.org? or something new?

Canonical is in the process of ditching X: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland

Ubuntu Phone uses Qt/QML and HTML5: http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile/

It's too bad that X11 is still the only GUI that really works remotely (for an individual application, not a full desktop).

Web is another GUI that works remotely for an individual application. Sure it's not perfect but neither is X.

I think they already realized that the desktop market is shrinking. Come to think of it, in my extended family I don't even know anyone who bought a desktop computer in the last 4 years. A few people got a laptop, lots of smart phones and tons of tablets.

So if they are going to wait to succeed on the desktop it might be too late. As fewer and fewer people will care about the desktop by that point.

>I don't even know anyone who bought a desktop computer in the last 4 years. A few people got a laptop

I'm pretty sure that when grandparent wrote, "desktop," they meant to include laptops.

On the contrary, due it being the same base, it will actually make the apps faster and more memory performant on the desktop, because it has to run in a constrained environment on mobile. I think it'll make for a more performant desktop OS.

iOS app ports certainly seem to be popular on OS X.

I hope that this and Firefox OS can borrow from each other liberally. I'm far from convinced that either will succeed, but I hope they do.

Here is the original Keynote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU

worth watching, Trust me.

As exciting as this is(and for the record based on initial impression i am excited) i am really getting tired of these Key Notes telling me what to think about there products. I know its all marketing but being constantly told how "amazing" "revolutionary" "awesome" these things are really is annoying.

I can decide these things for myself thank you.

Canonical is always trying to make itself more relevant by chasing the new hotness. First it was copying Windows. Then it was copying the Mac. Then tablets. Now smartphones. Unfortunately, the open source nature of their efforts means that they can never supply a meaningful value-add, even if they had as much money as their competitors.

Are you implying that Open Source has some secret destructive or creativeness repelling power? Android is open source.

Regardless of what the aftermath of Ubuntu on mobile may have, without any prejudice of it being over an eternal year away: the iOS interface for multi tasking is tame. It needs an overhaul.

For post-pc devices to go mainstream, they should display how easy it is to multitask on them. This use case scenario is extremely important on the iPhone. Android, Windows Phone, WebOS, and now Ubuntu Mobile — all have better multi tasking interfaces.

However, the counter argument is that an OS completely build out of blind gestures serves as completely not obvious. This is a problem for first case use scenarios. That being said, power users can rejoice alike.

P.S. If the Ubuntu Mobile continues to lag, we should just forget about it before it becomes the next WebOS. This is just getting embarrassing.

Swiping from the edges is exactly what I was hoping Google would do with Android, instead of wasting screen space with buttons. I think all Android's buttons could be repurposed into "edge actions", although they'd have to make them intuitive enough for people to get it quickly.

Isn't this what Windows 8 did for submenus?

I found it incredibly confusing in the context of using a mouse, but never tried it with touch.

Swiping from the left and right edges on phones is prone to get confused with the swiping inside apps, that's the reason that none of the big mobile OSes have it. I am curious to see whether that's taken care of here.

This is already a problem with Chrome for iOS. It makes building apps in the browser difficult when swiping on the left and right edges triggers a "tab" switch.

Chrome for Android does the same (you can change tabs by swiping left-right), and it's very unreliable - I manage to change tabs by accident by swiping, but can never do that on purpose...

Interestingly, I find the gestures from the side work much better on the Nexus 4 with the screen curve. Seems they designed the phone with chrome in mind.

Given that the Nexus 4 screen is designed to support edge swipes I wouldn't be surprised to see Android move in that direction.

Tough to make invisible things intuitive, but you can always force a quick intro tutorial like webOS and Windows 8. Trouble is, hand your device to someone else and they might have no idea how to operate it.

Jolla is really pushing edge gestures in their interface, and in the demo videos that have floated around in the last couple months it looks like a joy to operate.

In Phobuuntu's defense, you just need to know that the app quickmenu is on the left, status bar on the top, previous thing on the right, and application options on the bottom.

Edge actions and gestures are great as shortcuts for advanced users. I'm starting to think that "no chrome" UIs will never be suitable for ordinary users. Especially because they, practically speaking, will never be standard.

Android innovates on connections between apps more than the interface design itself. For the most part, the interface design is simply a modified desktop approach.

However, I would note that Google changed the old search button into a "swipe up from bottom" approach for Android 4.1. This brings up Google Now + voice search. So there is some "swipe from edge" functionality.

For Ubuntu Phone, the functions of the different edges will take getting used to. Of course, power users will eat it up.

My first reaction to this was "we don't need another phone platform". But you know what? I think their corporate focus is really smart - particularly at a time when both RIM and Microsoft are leaving craters in that market. I really hope they succeed.

proud to say I worked on this :)

Nice! Contributor or employee?

employee - UI design

more informations directly on http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile/ and more presentation for ubuntu for phones on http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/design

We need unlocked phones ... not another screen manager and drivers ...

Nexus; next question?

How to buy it free of contract outside US is a good one ... it has very limited availability.

"now web applications are first class citizens on phones too" - wow. This made my day, my year.

Firefox is already doing this on Android with the marketplace though. They are providing abstraction layers on the marketplace to let web apps take first class citizenry rolls on the current market leader. So it isn't a very persuasive argument for adoption.

How do they finance this? This whole thing is very interesting from a entrepreneurial stand point. The risk is much higher than on the desktop market.

"...there are no immediate plans for actual Ubuntu phones, and no carriers have been signed up yet -- although we're told that the OS will run on any new phone built for Android, should the manufacturer see merit in installing Ubuntu instead."

It will be interesting to see if/when a manufacturer picks this up, to hit the mainstream market.

Why the hell do I need manufacturer blessing?? I own the phone. Give me a ROM, Canonical.

It would be an impossible task to do that for all phones. But the community can make ROM's for different phones like they do it for Android.

Canonical must have at least one ROM that they use for their own testing. Why won't they even release that?

Information around the web suggests that it's being tested on the Galaxy Nexus, and that the image for that will be released.

No serious company wants the responsibility of bricking someone's smartphone.

Where it would get interesting is if they introduced this as a UML guest Android app.

"We're told the Galaxy Nexus-compatible build will be available for download within the next few weeks"

It says big things that no mobile operators or traditional hardware manufacturers are onboard.

Does it come with Amazon spying?

Yes. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU&feature=play... after a few minutes/seconds the search interface is demoed, that searches for films, music and books, presumably from Amazon, though that's not specified.

It's a full Ubuntu Desktop. Dock your phone and run "sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping". Or, alternatively, just open the Software Centre and remove it from there.

Those swiping gestures from the edges look incredibly cumbersome and awkward. It may look cool in a demo, but performing that repeatedly to use my phone throughout the day looks to be a bad experience.

The n9 does this. It's actually really enjoyable. I've been using it for a few months.

I find myself so used to it I keep trying to do it on android phones.

The n9 form factor does suit these gestures because it has a screen with smoothly bevelled edges that entices you to swipe.

I will second this: N9 is really nice device. BB10 will do this as well (does this if you have alpha device).

I am some how not very comfortable with ubuntu. Its bloating with so much code that its much slower than my arch linux.

But the good thing about this project is that with ubuntu, the other disributions will also try their hands on smartphones, which will certainly bring new ideas on the table. Like with current desktops there will be 2 kinds of smartphones, one which run "linux" and the rest.

P.S: Android only shares a common kernel with ubuntu, with rest being entirely different

This is exciting. They are truly talking about a single device that does it all for you -- your phone is your computer.

The phone UI looks a bit different, he says "clean and simple," but just from the video it seems like a bit much to do things. That could just be an initial reaction based on years of other phone OS usage.

Why hasnt anyone run with WebOS' UI approach? The whole cards thing seems like the best approach i've seen thus far

If I had to guess, I'd say people are probably scared of patents surrounding WebOS's cards system.

The winners do not adopt the innovations of the losers. History is littered with products with unique innovations that were never again touched.

For the unfamiliar (like me) here's a video of WebOS Activity Cards from Palm's 2009 keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUSui3rH1a8

I feel like, Canonical = Apple with openness in mind.

I really wish Canonical would focus on making the Linux Desktop/Laptop experience better but perhaps this will play out like Apple: bootstrap the company's growth on the success of a mobile device (iPod in Apple's case). Plus, Canonical can offer something Google really can't: a common interface across all devices (Chromebook hasn't really worked out).

> Chromebook hasn't really worked out

What?

The chromebook was the biggest selling laptop this Christmas on amazon.

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/chromebook-christmas-be...

Definitely far from not working out! I think it's pretty darn proven as a consumer product.

Amazon is the main channel for Chromebooks but not Macbooks. Amazon may not be a great sample of the laptop market percentage. I see way more Apple laptops than Chromebooks day to day. It'd be great if that changed in the future (and perhaps it will after this holiday shopping season via your link).

I'm feeling lazy after the holidays.

Does anyone have a good argument for why any smartphone manufacturer (or carrier) would choose Ubuntu Phone over official or opensource Android?

EDIT: OK, I've broken down and watched the video.

Sounds like an important featre is the unified enterprise management with existing Ubuntu servers and desktops.

I wonder if this will prove attractive to the remaining Blackberry holdouts?

You can dock your smartphone and have a complete desktop environment - no half-assed stuff - a full on desktop environment with all your desktop grade apps. That's even better than WP8 can do.

That alone is huge.

This one is easy. Nexus X.

Imagine if you are Samsung and you now must compete with Google releasing their own phone from google owned motorola. All those non-Google companies that now release Android phones should be looking past Android to something else. If they aren't, they are going to be extremely sorry in 2-4 years.

You really think Google is willing to drive Samsung, HTC, and LG away from Android just so Motorola can compete with them on hardware?

That would be an interesting move.

It will be very interesting to see how much Samsung, HTC, and LG (and Nvidia) do to support Phonebuntu.

If you were Samsung, HTC and LG, would you be betting your business on it? Would you not actively be looking at alternatives?

Yes, I would want to keep all my options open for future generations. But that doesn't mean I would invest real money in fully productizing and marketing an Ubuntu phone unless there was expected to be a real market for it.

Remaining BlackBerry holdouts will get BB10 in the end of this month.

awesome! now i can look forward to upgrades that will kill my phone as effectively as they do my desktop.

Haven't had that for years on Ubuntu, including beta releases (alpha or pre-alpha, yes you get breakage).

Like others here I'm hoping for a phone with desktop device when plugged into a dock driving a monitor and keyboard. I can dream...

Battle for number 3 place is on. And ubuntu does not look like an underdog here.

What I really want isn't a special Ubuntu Phone. It's a proper Linux running on Android devices, that's tailored for mobile usage. This looks great but I'd like to see it on my Android phone instead of Android.

Did you watch the video? You dock your phone and you've got the full desktop. This ubuntu phone is literally the FULL ubuntu desktop with a new UI on top. The only thing docking does is switch you to your desktop environment.

Yes I did watch it. I probably wasn't precise about what I meant. The emphasis was the "running on Android devices" part. I'd really like to see ROMs for existing devices rather than waiting for an entirely new Ubuntu Phone.

Given that by today, Ubuntu is (with a few possible exceptions) always installed on a machine after buying it, releasing a ROM seems more natural than trying to convince manufacturers to adopt it. Don't get me wrong, I would definitely like to see a phone shipping with this and if it's any good on the hardware side I'd probably buy it. For now, I wish for a ROM though.

Now I know what I will be getting when my N900 finally laid to rest. It's not just Ubuntu, but the whole variety of Linux flavours for phone that will surely arise once hardware is here.

A mini review by the Verge for those who want to see more : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXWnMTm7We8

My favorite part of Ubuntu Phone and Firefox OS is that they treat HTML5 as a first class citizen. Native development would be so much simpler if all platforms did the same.

So how does this affect getting Open webOS -- which is usually placed on top of Ubuntu on desktops -- onto smartphones? Does it make it easier or is this irrelevant to that?

I love to see a real linux on smartphone. But what's the graphics system? Definitely, it should not be X since X is too complicated. Is it wayland?

How exciting! Now to figure out how to install this. I'm not sure i understand how one could actually place phone calls with this.

Will Android apps be supported? Or must they be hacked? People want the best Google Maps not some second class html5 version.

Can I run this on my old iPhone 3G?

Most probably not. Apple doesn't like people hacking into Apple devices.

That's too bad for them...

Although their bank balance begs to differ... Ultimately though I would agree with you and hope smartphones will just be thought of as small computers in the future, you buy the hardware and have choices about what OS you want to run. I would love to be able to install different distros like with PC's, Mint Mobile running Cinnamon Touch would be good.

It would have been great if they released with a "Try it now on your rooted Android devices".

Can a phone running Ubuntu actually make a phone call? (no youtube here)

"It's one search to rule them all"...

am i the only one who think the interface is too complicated?

Edit: Here's the keynote video. Skip to about 6:35 sec for the new bits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU

Direct link to 6:35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU&feature=play...

First thoughts:

2014 is a long way away and a whole year is an eternity in mobile space.

It kind of looks like Unity in portrait mode but without the dock.

What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings(same as WebOS').

It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware, so will OEM(s) shipping devices with this OSes fall foul of Google's anti-fork rules[1] for Android? Or does that apply only to the Android SDK/Dalvik VM?

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57512418-94/alibaba-google-...

I think having anti-fork rules on the Android kernel would violate the GPL, so that couldn't happen...

The anti-fork rules concern Google's support and applications for devices, not the source code of the OS itself.

Amazon has forked Android, but by doing so they aren't allowed to use any of Google's apps in their devices.

The golden handcuffs are your ability to ship Android's userland (including access to use of trademarks and Play Store). If Google shuts you out, you're out. Ship all the linux kernels you want.

Technically, you can probably ship something based on pure AOSP, but your competitors will have had pre-AOSP access to the code for multiple months and there are no guarantees that AOSP even works without Google's magic proprietary mojo. CyanogenMod had to develop the missing pieces when Google sent their C&D over the proprietary bits. I would suspect defensive things designed to make it more difficult for Amazon to leech AOSP are either present or coming soon particularly with the rumors that Amazon is working toward introducing a phone.

> there are no guarantees that AOSP even works without Google's magic proprietary mojo

What do you mean by this? If you mean in the market, it can work. Amazon's devices are proof. If a manufacturer is shipping just AOSP, it needs to have a working complement to Google's suite of apps or it needs to have a different value proposition altogether.

> CyanogenMod had to develop the missing pieces when Google sent their C&D over the proprietary bits

What "missing bits"? They were shipping Google's suite of proprietary apps on top of their AOSP-based ROM and they stopped after the C&D.

Once Google's proprietary stuff was deleted, it was not possible to provision a phone (until the FOSS alternates for things like Provision.apk were developed). I can't remember if you got bootloops or what. There were other problems, too. I think AOSP has been friendly toward patches for that sort of thing... ensuring AOSP without gapps works just wasn't one of Google's requirements (at least early on--it may be now for all I know). Not that you can really fault them for having different priorities.

The "anti fork" agreements Google has with OEMs are not public, but some terms of these agreements were made public in a lawsuit involving Skyhook: http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

What it boils down to is that Google has a final approval over any Google-logo Android device. For phone OEMs, this looks like absolute and arbitrary control by Google, but, in reality, it's a three-way negotiation between the OEM, Google, and, in the US, the carrier controlling the channel for the product, with any one of them able to sink a product before it reaches the market.

Google has never seen fit to make licensing terms for Google's ecosystem apps (Maps, Play, etc.) transparent. That's a pretty sharp contrast with Android as an open source project, and even with the way Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) was licensed.

So Android is open, on the one (AOSP) hand, and un-transparently proprietary on the other hand. That leaves an obvious market opening for a truly open OS. But, so far, Tizen, Open WebOS, or any other possible contenders have been insufficient and/or under-developed. Maybe Canonical will get it right.

> It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware

Where did you see that? Are you sure you're not confusing it with the "Ubuntu for Android" project? That is a different project from this.

I don't think an Ubuntu phone will have anything to do with Android. It's its own OS, and you won't see it on all phones or anything like that - just on the "Ubuntu phones" that will be shipping starting with 2014. They might port it to some existing hardware like Galaxy Nexus for demo purposes, though, the way Mozilla did with Firefox OS on Galaxy S2.

I got it from The Verge.

"As already teased and promised, today Canonical is taking the wraps off the mobile version of Ubuntu, which is built around the existing Android kernel and drivers, but doesn't use a Java Virtual Machine and promises to use "the full power of the phone.""

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/2/3827922/ubuntu-phone-os-ann...

I got confused with all the simultaneous news articles so sorry about the "it says" part.

> Where did you see that? Are you sure you're not confusing it with the "Ubuntu for Android" project? That is a different project from this.

It was mentioned in the keynote video, towards the very end ~21:00.

Quoting http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/operators-and-oems :

> Ubuntu has already been adapted to run on chipsets using the ARM and Intel x86 architectures relevant for mobile devices, with the core system based around a typical Android Board Support Package (BSP). So chipset vendors and hardware manufacturers do not need to invest in or maintain new hardware support packages for Ubuntu on smartphones. In short, if you already make handsets that run Android, the work needed to adopt Ubuntu will be trivial.

But that doesn't say anything about being related in any way with Android code, does it?

Also I think since kernel 3.3 Android uses the exact same kernel as other Linux distros. The Android kernel got merged with the normal Linux kernel. So I don't see why it would be a problem for them to use the same kernel.

Not everything from Android is in the mainline kernels. There are still a few bits that are Android specific that would need to be reworked to even be accepted into staging.

There has been a lot of great ARM work lately in mainline too but there are still quite a few drivers missing that you can't even get docs for (even with signing NDAs) so the drivers for mainline get written based on the BSP-ish kernel drivers which aren't always written the best.

He never said it did. He said that they can use Android kernel and drivers. That doesn't mean it's using Android's java environment, just the kernel and drivers beneath it.

I think they are trying to tell device & part manufacturers that since both Ubuntu and Android are Linux kernels, they won't need to rewrite their drivers. Perhaps they've borrowed code from the Android kernel?

Wow, I'm impressed even though it is just a demo video. One thing that doesn't feel intuitive to me is the left/right edge choices. It's the same problem with Windows 8, I feel like if I pull an app in from one side, I should be able to switch to the previous app by pulling in from the other side.

>What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings

Connect a display and you have full ubuntu. With today's smartphones already computationally competitive with your standard netbook, that alone is a massive value proposition to me. Add something like motorola's lapdock and there is 95% of all my computing needs met, all with a single, central data storage.

Hopefully porting from linux will be fairly straightforward too.. just a new UI support?, giving apps that work from desktop to mobile. Not to mention that is has most of the FFOS advantage too.

> Connect a display and you have full ubuntu.

I didn't see this mentioned in the keynote. I was specifically looking for it and there were zero mentions?

Mark S. mentions it in the Engadget interview: "If I dock this, I can get the full Ubuntu desktop".

So is it going to have two WMs and two versions of every desktop app? One touch optimized and one for the desktop?

It doesn't sound all that wonderful.

Desktop/mobile crossover might be better served with cloud-sync.

> cloud-sync

Except if I'm in a developing nation where I'm not guaranteed connectivity. (Don't scoff yet, because I'd say the US is in this category.)

No. I think it will have a native GUI toolkit that can adapt to both with some hints by the developer.

Currently Canonical encourages using QML for writing apps that will be mobile-friendly: http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile/

Maybe this is going to be the mobile toolkit you’re talking about?..

> Hopefully porting from linux will be fairly straightforward too.. just a new UI support?, giving apps that work from desktop to mobile. Not to mention that is has most of the FFOS advantage too.

I wouldn't trivialise the effort required to create a touch-friendly UI, especially from an existing desktop application (with the expectations that go with it).

Well, you're assuming they would need a new UI. You know what would be really nice to have on a phone if it didn't take any real effort to get it there? bash, ssh, nfs/sshfs/samba, etc.

I know the typical user isn't going to care, but I could see how it would be a big win for developers, and as we all know, "developers developers developers."

That didn't work out for Maemo. Is this time going to be different?

I don't know. But Maemo didn't also happen to be the most popular desktop Linux distribution. And it was effectively abandoned at birth by its creators, which I have a suspicion Canonical is not about to do.

Depends if it gets shackled to a completely schizophrenic manufacturer or not.

I use Maemo every day and I'd say it definitely worked out.

I love my jailbroken iPhone for this reason. Bash, SSH and SSHFS are really useful to have.

I got some basic n900 apps up and running pretty easily with vala and the maemo touch widgets. porting an existing ui might be hard, but building one around a set of touch widgets is relatively straightforward.

And what happens when a desktop monitor is connected? Will it give me the same small-screen touch-optimized app or are the apps supposed switch to desktop UI mode? The former would be disastrous, and the latter would be optimal but extremely unlikely (to put it lightly). It seems half-baked...

There is absolutely nothing stopping us developers from sensing when it occurs and switching accordingly. This is really the point: we can choose to scale from Desktop to Mobile UI's, sanely, without having the market separation enforced upon us by those who would control the industry.

Do you know how easy it is to port touch-friendly UI frameworks/SDK's such as MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) to Ubuntu? Damn easy.

In fact, its already done: and right now, MOAI - and similar tools, just like it (Love2D, Cocos2D, &etc.) - are already out there, running on the existing OS's, and providing multi-touch interfaces that definitely compete with existing Frameworks/SDK's. There is little that Cocoa does, for the 2D gamer/mobile developer, that MOAI cannot do, also. (Granted: native interfaces are a weakness, but then again: non-native, truly cross-platform UI's are a STRENGTH in the face of the existing market)

By making this move, Canonical has just invalidated all the proprietary bullshit the average Objective-C developer has to contend with, in order to develop an app for the mobile platform. Same with Android - both Objective-C and Android investments have just been bumped down a few tens of points, in my opinion. Why bother learning proprietary locked-in crap, when you can pick a framework that will run easily on all of the platforms, including the up and coming new Ubuntu-Mobile?

Where once we have over-specialization and a slavish devotion to technocratic dogma from an oppressive regime (Apple, and in lesser yet still significant ways, Android too), we now have a real ability to choose our tools and standardize on the ones with which we most feel comfortable.

Make no mistake, this is a genius move. Not only do we have Mobile becoming Desktop becoming the Cloud, finally, but we have it with Open Tools, that no other company has the balls to produce.

> Do you know how easy it is to port touch-friendly UI frameworks/SDK's such as MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) to Ubuntu? Damn easy.

Starting from an existing touch framework/application is not the problem.

"Porting" a desktop application to a touch application is not "just" (to quote polshaw) adding a new UI. There's a world of difference between a desktop GUI--esp. in the Linux world, where many apps are remarkably different due to the ecosystem--and a touch GUI. Touch target sizing, what information to get rid of (if any?), what to add, speed (arguably more important on a mobile device), hardware acceleration (read: being gentle on battery life & improving touch responsiveness)... it goes on.

The OS might have Ubuntu/Linux roots, but it doesn't automatically mean it gets a free ride to a great touch-friendly mobile app library.

You also have to be aware of context, otherwise you will have apps downloading crap loads of data over your limited SIM contract, or eating up your battery for something that only makes a difference on desktop...

I wonder if they use libhybris or something similar to pull that trick and to use bionic drivers. I hope they'll push for regular glibc drivers as well though.

I still don't understand why desktop users have to suffer with a crappier desktop UI (Unity) due to this.

Here's their developer site: http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile/

From what it looks like, I'd need to redesign my apps from ground up using QML. They could have leveraged Android apps ecossystem, like Amazon, OUYA and even BB10 are doing. But chose not to. Out of nothing other than greed. And for that one reason, I predict dead on arrival.

Edit: Just had an Ubuntu community manager answer my question on their official g+ hangout. And confirmed that indeed. You'd have to redesign apps for it from scratch in QML. Nor are they planing to make Android apps compatible, nor easy to port in any way. Oh well, I'm certainly not gonna waste my time developing for yet another platform. Goodbye.

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How could they? This isn't Android, it's an entirely different OS. If it ran Android apps, it might as well be a custom launcher instead.

They had a working prototype that would run Android and Ubuntu side by side. Would work as a standard Android phone. But when you dock it to the desktop, it's a 100% capable Ubuntu computer, sharing resources with Android. That was perfect. It's the best of both worlds, I'm sure it would be a huge hit. Leverage both the Android mobile ecosystem + Linux desktop at once? That was genius. But instead they chose the greedy path and try to control all of it themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv1Z7bf4jXY

edit: I just learned that Ubuntu for Android was not abandoned. It's still a separate project. They wanna release Ubuntu for Android first in mid 2013. And hopefully that will be a gateway to get Android users interested in the Ubuntu Phone which will launch in 2014.

http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

Yeah, I loved that, but it wasn't a mobile OS, it was just Ubuntu running as an Android app. It didn't even have a UI om the phone, IIRC.

No it isn't an app. It is actually the full Ubuntu OS running on your android device. The point wasn't for it to be a touch screen, the point was that you could dock your device and suddenly be using a full desktop OS with all your desktop grade applications.

Yes, but it's running inside Android. It's not a complete OS that takes over the phone.

No, no its not running inside Android. Android and its Java environment run alongside/at the same time as ubuntu.

Motorola were the only OEM to have interest in ubuntu for android.. they took it, and completely ruined it.[1] There was no greed on canonical's part. I'm not sure whether i'd prefer 'android+ubuntu', or this 'ubuntu for all the screens' (existing ecosystem with mature OS vs a real free, unified desktop+mobile OS), but they aren't dropping either, apparently. I do wish they would allow the developer community access to their builds, though. I want it now!

1. see webtop; also look on XDA to see how to partially restore it to canonical's idea.

Another mobile framework, but not a new thing by any means. There are already plenty of Qt apps and libs (desktop + Symbian apps written with Qt4.8 + QML) out there.

But yes, porting from Android/Windows/iOS might be painfull.

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