In which Ars is allowed to see—but not touch—an Ubuntu phone
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
A very large fraction of this community would probably want a linux phone that allows you to basically carry your desktop around.
I hope they find a manufacturer soon.
This is a pretty limp excuse. I wish they'd just drop the PR-speak and say that it's not quite ready yet.
Re: lack-o-source code: "We don't want users to install it on hardware that we're not sure it can support"
Not really getting off on the right foot with the tech community either, IMHO.
I can't begin to emphasize enough how much I want this to succeed. (One open-source OS to rule them all, and what not...) It's a bit sad that its birth feels like another canned industry event rather than a true hacker love-child. But hey, at least it's progress, right?
Anyway, it is really doubtful that they will get much traction against iOS, let alone iOS + Android, even with a perfect launch.
Ubuntu is in slightly different situation, and people would more willingly forgive glitches as long as they are trying. Swartz's point (among others) about the Hollywood launch was that the more you set yourself up as glassy and untouchable, the more people want you to fail, and the bigger you usually do. So, if Ubuntu/Canonical suffers the same sort of articles as the Windows phone article from earlier it will have probably been because they took themselves so seriously that people became all too eager to point out their flaws. It's the Streisand effect on marketing hype. As soon as you say "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" everyone starts tugging at the curtain. "No touching" already works poorly for geeks (and at this stage, I think only geeks care about Ubuntu on a phone), and even less well for a company that built all their offerings on free software.
As for traction, I think Android could work to Canonical's advantage. I don't know how much Google "needs" Android, but they even might benefit from outsourcing the platform. (Those Android phones could pretty easily become Ubuntu phones.) Dalvik's open-source, so there's no reason to think Ubuntu wouldn't be able to run Android software out of the box. Ultimately platforms are less fertile than the standards they embody, so if Ubuntu becomes only "another Linux phone" it's still fine by me.
In the long run you may be right, but it's going to take quite a bit longer and until then the mobile market is going to be even more entrenched than now.
Mozilla controls and understands the vital parts of their platform, their rendering engine and JS VM, they can concentrate their work on making them performant enough to compete and making sure that the long run will come sooner rather than later.
So yeah, I'm impressed by them having a narrow focus and playing to their strengths rather than making something that is just like Android, only with no apps.
Sure, native apps have advantages. But those advantages only exist if native apps exist, and for all the new mobile platforms, native apps don't really exist.
You may recall that certain Ubuntu phones will become full Ubuntu PCs when docked with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.
The idea of being able to carry around just one small, main device instead of two separate (though well-integrated) ones, a la iOS/OS X, would probably be just enough to tip the scales and get me to use it, provided the experience was good enough.
I think I'd still do it, but I'd really like to have some sort of automatic sync to another hard disk. Maybe when I plug it into my desktop docking station, it would automatically sync everything to the hard disk I have there. That would really be the best of both worlds. (I seem to recall some Ubuntu feature like that, but I don't remember the details.)
But that doesn't change the fact that I would do it; it just makes good backups even more important.
Don't worry though, this is definitely going to be different than how android development has proceeded.
I wonder what app development will be like if their browser actually gives some system access.
Another interesting option would be to allow users to have a more general policy, like "I'm OK with any app reading my Twitter stream, but not with allowing them to post"
I gave Unity 3 ubuntu releases until I tried Gnome 3.6 and have wondered how I survived until now. Look at how quick Gnome's sidebar is compared to Unity. Look how they got the movement right in term of screen window movement. Look at how quick the finder is. Look at how the bar hides when you don't need it by default. Look how the menu bar is with each window reducing the distance your mouse has to travel to get to what you want.
Having the Unity side bar on a phone is a waste of screen real estate. 70% of the screen is with the previous application which you are switching away from and you are going to have to scroll more with the single width unity bar (based on the images seen).