Hacker News Reader

Comment by mladenkovacevic | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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..

> 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..

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com