Ubuntu Smartphone Shipping in October | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu Smartphone Shipping in October

blogs.wsj.com

76 pointsergo1429 comments

So to summarize, the Wall Street Journal and two talking heads (apart from Mark Shuttleworth) are skeptical of Ubuntu ("a Linux-based operating system used to run servers and other infrastructure in many corporate IT departments") on phones for the following reasons:

1) Ubuntu's "popularity among open source developers"

2) Ubuntu is all-or-nothing and "switching to an all-Ubuntu-based environment wouldn't make sense for many organizations", unless you "employ large numbers of Linux developers" (see 1).

3) "[T]he real challenge is overcoming this very large BYOD phenomenon" since bringing your own device precludes bringing an Ubuntu phone.

4) "It seems overly complicated to me"

That says more about WSJ than it says about Ubuntu on mobile...

I can't predict whether the phone would sell to a mainstream audience, but as a developer I can't wait to get my hands on this and hack on it. If command line access is a first class citizen, and I produce my own scripts to control the phone's IO devices, I'll be more than happy.

You speak my thoughts sir. I wonder if there are enough developers that would buy the phone to make it profitable... hmm or do we need that? Perhaps if it's not profitable for Caronical, the open source community can continue on it.

Probably only pretty dedicated developers will buy it though, most will still go with the mainstream option because it's the easiest. I mean, how many devs carry iPhones?

Between this, Windows Phone 8, Firefox OS, Open webOS, and a resurgent BBOS, 2013 is going to be a race for third place on mobile.

I look for this to be the year of cross platform portability even for native apps. The only entity not playing along is Apple.

I'd love to see a good showing by any of them, but so far they've all launched with a thud.

Deleted comment

http://androidandme.com/2013/01/smartphones-2/first-ubuntu-p...

This is way too ambitious, way too soon for Canonical.

I don't think it will fail. I'm sure Canonical's done a lot of market research and, if nothing else, knows it will sell on geek appeal to a lot of people, hackers included.

But it will be laughably unable to compete with iOS and Android. Apple is decades old as a company and designed a phone after it had hit something of a plateau between OS X and revolutionizing music (by that I mean they had fully established themselves and could spend time on another project, not that they were beyond further innovation).

Canonical has not hit a plateau with Ubuntu, and tackling smartphones is more ambitious than the droves of companies looking to do it now would have you think.

I think this will be similar to what happened with Windows 8 - tweaking the desktop version of software to fit a tablet/phone until neither is a complete package anymore.

Android was made by a company far smaller then Canonical.

Canonical's OS and Android share the same Linux heritage. Canonical has proved it is able of writing a window manager. Linux is pretty advanced to support low power mobile devices. I'd say that Canonical stand a very good chance, as they stand on top of all the Android work done so far.

Edit: Anyway, Smartphone is the new desktop for 80% of users

Except that Windows 8 did no tweaking, MS decided that tablets and phones need a new WinRT API and tried to make Win32 obsolete.

Mark my words: this phone will be an utter failure. "Linux" or "Ubuntu" aren't some magic talismans you can apply to any product and make it great; in fact, it takes a lot of hard work, design talent, and money to make a phone, and Canonical does not have the last two, possibly the last three.

What's with all this negativity? It's the easiest thing in the world to criticise and most people are naysayers because of that, but if the ones that actually build stuff would listen to all of this criticism then nothing would get done.

> it takes a lot of hard work, design talent, and money

So freaking what? Besides fart apps, all other projects need hard work, design talent and money. That didn't stop projects from succeeded without design talent and/or money, with hard work as a substitute for both.

Android sucked up until version 2.3. Did that stop it from being a success? And sure, Android had good timing too, but the current market for smartphones and tablets is only getting started and will be much larger than it currently is. I can also see phone manufacturers being afraid of Google's or Microsoft's grip on the platform ... Samsung for instance is pouring resources into Bada, just in case.

Personally I think Firefox OS has a much better chance of succeeding as an alternative to Android, but at the very least I'm not ready to lambast Canonical for trying. The world needs more builders and less naysayers.

Personally I have a hard time believing either will gain significant market share (much as I would like them to). Even Microsoft, a much larger company with huge brand recognition and what people seem to think is a well-executed product (never tried a Windows phone myself) keeps failing. But best of luck to them. Having a dockable smartphone would be fantastic... if you could switch to xmonad on the desktop :)

On Microsoft, it's debatable if Windows Phone is a well executed product or not. I played with one and personally I hated it.

First of all, with both Windows Phone and Windows 8 they went way too far with their minimalistic design. The interface gives you no clues on what things are clickable, or what actions you can do. Many times you end up doing things and have no idea what got you there in the first place. Going back to what you were doing is equally painful. Microsoft also tried to come up with design guidelines, but they aren't the kind of company to enforce such guidelines and even they are guilty of breaking those guidelines, so there's also a lack of established conventions. The interface, while pretty and shiny, simply sucks.

Second, Windows Phone 7 (don't know about 8) lacked the ability to run native binaries, with some rare exceptions if you happened to be one of few privileged big companies. This is in addition to the lack of support for OpenGL, making ports of games a bitch to deal with. Did you know that many games that are available on both Android and iOS have the same codebase for both? It's no wonder that Microsoft's Marketplace is empty, because nobody wanted to deal with yet another proprietary platform using proprietary APIs.

Speaking of WinPhone 7, it also sucked that many users didn't receive the upgrade to WinPhone 8. In regards to upgrades, at least Android has the excuse of fragmentation that you can put up with because of its popularity, but Microsoft has no excuse for that.

Third, everybody fears a new Microsoft monopoly. Windows Phone is a proprietary OS, built by a big company which is known to use aggresive tactics to move to new markets, by averaging their already established monopoly on desktops. Android on the other hand, even if it is controlled by Google, can always be forked in case shit happens (hey, Amazon already did it). Android also allows users to install apps from third party sources. Windows Phone does not allow one to do that. My Samsung Galaxy came with their Samsung's marketplace on it (or whatever they call it) installed. Sure it sucks in comparison to Google Play, but it's there for their peace of mind (they also have their own OS btw, called Bada, which is more successful than Windows Phone, because Samsung knows how to sell).

Microsoft is also known for dropping the ball after they achieve success ... projects like IExplorer and Windows Mobile stagnated for years before Microsoft finally felt the heat from competition. Only Nokia was stupid enough to invest heavily in Windows Phone and that's only because Microsoft is putting money in their pockets.

I don't know how good Ubuntu will be for smartphones or how well Canonical will execute. But Ubuntu (and Firefox OS for that matter) will not have the same problems and we might be surprised.

Let me put it another way: it pains me to see mediocre companies like Canonical chase the latest fad with "me too" products. If more people could recognize failure ahead of time, perhaps we would get more true innovation somewhere else, or at least real attempts at home run, big bet initiatives. The world is full of opportunities to make original contributions. Look at Elon Musk: he may fail, but at least he is a prime mover.

a) you seem to have a serious personal problem with Canonical.

b) Ubuntu Phone is certainly not a me-too product. Its and interesting iteration of the concept, especially with the ability of running a fully-fledged desktop.

Interestingly, for a time some Android handset manufacturers put out concept phones that could dock with laptop shells; when the phone was in the dock, you got a desktop version of Android, and your phone OS was still running in a window in that desktop. In fact, the mobile OS switched over to running in a virtual machine and the desktop OS took over the hardware. Interesting stuff but it went nowhere.

Apple had a different take, patenting a method to place all of your desktop apps and settings on your phone (and possibly the OS itself) allowing you to use any Mac as if it were your own. Not productized yet, of course.

Yep. You say the magic words: "not productized yet, of course."

So Ubuntu phone is novel, except to all of us geeks and is an interesting way to break into the desktop market. Also, it doesn't use the "2 VM"-Concept: it is one operating system with 2 shells from the ground up, not tacked onto Android.

Microsoft had awesome touch devices quite a while ago (I played around with a Surface table and really liked it, int its rough state), but didn't execute. And thats the important part of it. If Canonical executes that idea, they will be first in their niche.

That is one interpretation. However, given Android and Apple's proven ability to execute, I suspect this feature was never productized because it's not mainstream enough to matter. They looked at it, and shelved it. Even BlackBerry didn't do it, and their new phone is chock full of cool stuff. Personally, I think even "non mainstream" is too generous; it's a Hail Mary feature.

That said, if Canonical can subsist on a fraction of 1.74% Linux market share (as measured by browser usage), perhaps they can subsist on a fraction of that in the mobile phone market, too.

I will mark them, but you quick dismissal of the Ubuntu teams design ability strikes me as odd.

All Canonical websites are very nice, Unity is a great looking and consistent shell (even if some people disagree with the overall concept) and current descriptions of Ubuntu Phone really showed that they poured a lot of knowledge into them. And then, Canonical lacks design talent?

What do you consider failure? eg would you count 10 million units as a failure?

I do agree with your sentiments and would be surprised if they even managed to sell 100k units. The problem is I can't see who would want it to actually succeed. There isn't anything in it for hardware manufacturers unless they have a large guaranteed order. And since Ubuntu uses the Android kernel, the manufacturer will have to do an Android bring up no matter what.

For the carriers it might be a useful bargaining chip but they can already play Android, Windows, Blackberry etc against each other. A retailer would need to make sufficient additional revenue to justify the costs of additional training of its staff. App developers would ultimately need to get paid, and a large installed base is very conducive to that. Canonical have approximately zero credit cards on file. Google also do kickbacks to carriers when someone on their network purchases from the Play store.

>And since Ubuntu uses the Android kernel,

The Android kernel?

It is Linux but with various things done the Android way and including device drivers not in the standard kernel tree, as well as binary blobs depending on hardware. The important point is that Ubuntu will not be using their regular kernel and changing options to make it work for the phones, but instead will be using the Android flavoured kernel and drivers.

Some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Linu...

http://elinux.org/Android_Kernel_Features

http://lwn.net/Articles/472984/

There is also Documentation/android.txt in some kernel trees.

You are right about drivers but I'm not so sure about kernel. Are you sure you are not confusing Ubuntu for Phones and Ubuntu for Android?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Phone "The system can be used with standard Android kernel which leads it to be installable on most recent Android smartphones." http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone "yet it uses the same drivers as Android" http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/operators-and-oems "with the core system based around a typical Android Board Support Package (BSP)"

So definitely the drivers and one of the rags did report that the Android kernel would be used. It would also be rather brave for Canonical to use Android drivers and binary blobs on a standard kernel since it would be a combination never been used before and probably require a bit of work (eg making sure drivers work with and without wakelocks) not to mention additional testing.

Both will use the same kernel.

The difference is that Ubuntu phone will not have a JVM as its main runtime.

iOS runs fast native Apps, while Android runs in a VM. This makes iOS faster and/or more battery efficient. This speed/performance attracts users.

On the other hand iOS is a closed system while Android is open. An open system attracts developers.

Ubuntu has potentially both technical advantages. It will have fast native Apps, it already has a Ubuntu store, it has Ubuntu One (similar to Dropbox / Skydrive) and it will be more open than either of iOS or Android.

And Ubuntu has proven that they can deliver, with Unity in the desktop. I'm using it right now (inside a VM running on Windows 7) and honestly is the best Linux I have ever used both in the desktop and as a server in AWS.

The only reason I can think for a Ubuntu phone failure is total lack of carriers interested in the product (I think more than one chinese company will jump with full force to Ubuntu, remember the so called Alibaba OS), or a half assed launch/support (again it would be the carriers fault, and it would be only relevant in USA).

If I had spare money I would propose a longbet against you ^_^

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