>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.
... in 2005. Phones are powerful computing devices, and they are big business.
The big business part is true but tablets also are big and could make some sense as an Ubuntu platform.
Tablets are cool but they can't conveniently become phones, but phones can become tablets/desktop/TVs/ebook reader with appropriate accessories.
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.
(Guess what OS I was running on my laptops 5 years ago?)
Except for hard drive size and bandwidth, it's the same or better than the dual core laptop I had 5 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
People sometimes take liberties with claims about what runs on what, but generally do follow that guideline.