Alternatives to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone
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UP's achilles heel is the lack of proprietary hardware, 99% of the users out there can't even root their phones let alone install a completely different OS on it. Couple that with the innability to run Android apps and the horrible UX that is unity and you have a package nobody wants.
Sailfish has no chance at all of growing beyond a very small niche of people. Tizen is basically Samsung's attempt at getting Google out of the picture now that is the biggest fish in the phone sea.
BB10 is a better option than most of these OS', even WebOS should be in this list and yet for some reason it was left aside.
Ah, so many fun options, so little time :)
Everyone else is learning by doing. Even Samsung. Samsung's feature phones run RTOSs licensed by Samsung, and, of course, while Samsung has made some impressive modifications to Android, that's far from showing they can make a complete modern phone OS.
Based on the early revs, Ubuntu is by far the most polished.
Canonical is also led by someone with a driving vision, very deep pockets and an absolute want to make a mark on mobile.
So, Ubuntu has the most experienced team, the most polished early rev product and a focused founder. No way that Ubuntu Touch isn't the front runner here. Frankly, it isn't even close (or fair) to compare the rest to Ubuntu.
While Ubuntu has experience bundle's open source software and to a smaller extent creating their own, they don't have any experience in mobile, which is a different ball game entirely. Early progress is impressive though, I will agree.
Ubuntu Touch is heavily dependent on Canonical being able to do major surgery on the Linux graphics stack on a very tight schedule. I agree with their plan and the reasoning behind it, but there are many reasons to doubt they can execute on schedule.
As for the team, Ubuntu has some experienced phone OS developers but nowhere near the depth Jolla has.
The way that Ubuntu used SurfaceFlinger as a provisional system compositor is brilliant. But getting from there to a product is more work than Canonical has ever had to put into a project.
Samsung shipped successful BadaOS phones under the Wave line. People on HN should be uniquely qualified to know what it means to actually ship a product and not dismiss it so out of hand.
Bada was an extensive userland sitting on top of either Linux or proprietary BSD-ish kernels and was the culmination of probably a decade of effort. I never saw anything other than prototypes running on top of Linux kernels though. The shipping product was entirely proprietary and achieved some decent share in a few markets (Brazil and Europe I think) for the total lack of marketing.
Before iPhone, mobile OEMs were not expected to know what to do with software. The exception, at the time, was Nokia, which by itself constituted the entire first tier of the mobile handset business.
As for Intel, I'm sure many people on this forum have their own stories of Intel and an un-serious dabbler in OSs. The example I know of is their brief ownership of a DSP OS. Microsoft convinced them they really shouldn't be trying to define multimedia APIs and software for PCs, and that was soon over.
The bottom line is, there is a firm basis in history for thinking neither Samsung nor Intel, much less the two "working together," such as that cooperation is, can produce a serious mobile OS product.
Usually these are Android-phones, already open-source friendly and easy to build for. You will find all the relevant details in the appropriate sub-forums on XDA. If you want to try them today, you can.
This should definitely not be confused for vapourware.
So it's still rough and there's not much good will on the dev side.
If you want the long one: I do maintenance for older (OS4~7) BB apps so I have an interest in where the platform goes. I'm following the evolution of the new OS and SDK since the playbook to the alpha device and up to the Z10, but even after the bbconf workshops on webworks or the sessions on cascade I don't see a future for native dev on this platform, and most of our clients just want their android app ported to BB10.
From the dev perspective, I don't see a good ROI in deeply learning the platform, so I'll be happy with watching over the shoulders of the guys dealing with it. Hearsay is OK for me when I see the support tickets flying around. Like there is no simple way to have the scroll position of a listview in cascades...that's just crazy when so many apps will be managing lists.
As a user, I'm not in the target audience since they never bothered to add japanese input support, but I tried most of devices by pure curiosity.
I genuinely wonder what particular feature is so well executed that you wanted to dismiss my opinion. I've seen some feature here and there that aren't bad, the focus on gestures is distinctive and there is a definitive push for a "modern" feel...but I'm not a big fan of the swipe up/down gestures, as actual content can be found near these areas, and it conflicts with other operations (like drawing on the screen). Even the task switching is tiresome at times, as app order is not fully predictable (or you have an excelent memory)
Is there any aspect that is not decent but really great?
a. The OS felt as responsive as Windows Phone and all the custom gesture recognition works as advertised(e.g. Peek).
b. The apps I used included Twitter, the Blackberry Hub (e-mail, contact etc.), the Camera app and Evernote. Of these, the Evernote app seemed to be a little rough (mainly UI glitches), but the rest worked well.
I haven't used the Developer Toolchain for QNX/BB10, but have friends who seem to think that it's not too bad. They are waiting for sales figures to decide whether or not they should think about releasing a BB10 app.
Off-topic: As someone who likes tinkering with things, hardware repair-ability is something I pay attention to. The Z10 is the most repairable phone out there according to iFixit (8/10): http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/BlackBerry+Z10+Teardown/13445...
I write most of my apps in Python, and they work beautifully. I'm able to rapidly prototype and make changes as needed. Having done a lot of Android development, I can say the BlackBerry development tools and methods are actually easier and better to use. I think iOS dev is still more mature though.
Sales for my app have been decent. I need to push out an update soon, and do some more marketing to help it out though.
As a user, the device is great. I'm running the release OS on a Dev Alpha B, but I'll be getting a limited edition device once I ship this prototype back. It's smooth, fast, and works the way I expect it too. Again, having several Android devices, I can say that that OS never worked quite the way I did.
The other is to go deeper and integrate with cascades UI and process messages between the QML/Qt framework and a python event loop. [1] Project going this route can be found at http://hg.microcode.ca/blackberry-py/src/
Other "semi-supported" interpreters include Lua and Erlang. [2] I'm sure someone has a ruby vm by now.
[0]: http://peterhansen.ca/blog/bbx-python-direct-entry-point.htm...
[1]: http://peterhansen.ca/blog/blackberry-tart-preview.html
(Disclosure: I'm one of the lead contributors.)
Ah! If only you could code android apps in python. That is a plus for BB in my book.
From my own experience and from reading various forums, enabling encryption has a decent chance of putting your phone in a state where it will randomly and frequently reboot. At least, that's the theory; I'm in the process of disabling encryption now, so soon I should know whether that makes the reboots go away. Other than that, some of the setup is a bit weird, and other things just take some getting used to.
The app store (BlackBerry World) is a bit empty. I've found most of the apps that I need, but if you're looking for a specific app (especially anything from Google), prepare to be disappointed. I haven't started doing any development, but the docs generally look good, and I'm really excited to get my feet wet with Qt Quick on a phone. I think they made the right choice there, although I haven't actually gotten into it yet.
So, overall, I do think the Z10 has great potential. Something about the entire UI just feels respectful of the user; it stays out of the way and it almost always does exactly what I want it to do (unique in my personal experience with touch-based devices).
The Z10 has a 1280x768 resolution on a 4.2 inch screen. That is a 355ppi pixel density. That is better than the iphone 5(326ppi) and Galaxy S3(306ppi). Samsung's S4 although is a different story.
Have seen not much fruit of that other than the QNX car project [0]. I remember seeing a Porshce at CES a year or two ago that had the system in it and it integrated with the Blackberry Playbook pretty well.
For my next phone, I'll leave iOS and get a garbage feature phone (Symbian, or something). This will be when I get my next iPad, which will have 4G (I'll also need a small iPod for music).
I will just suffer adding phone numbers and writing SMS the old fashioned way -- along with the week of battery life...
The 808 PureView was announced to be the last Symbian phone some time ago. Vertu the "luxury" brand that Nokia sold to private equity has dropped Symbian as well. They were the last ones producing Symbian products of which I am aware. The Vertu Ti is the first Android handset produced by Nokia actually.
A titanium case and reuses some of the internals of the Lumia 920.
It's funny that you say that because as a long-time Symbian user I remember when "Symbian" was pretty much synonymous with "smartphone", at least in my part of the world.
As for your idea, well, I'm afraid devices that run recent editions of Symbian (Symbian^3/Anna/Belle, Symbian Series 60 5th Edition) usually don't deliver very good battery life. You'd have better luck with an S60 3rd Edition phone, especially a business-oriented one like the Nokia E72 or the E5 (I own the latter and can recommend it for sheer repairability -- see my earlier HN comment [1]) but it still won't run for a week on a single charge like Nokia's grayscale featurephones do; it's closer to 3-4 days with a fair amount of web browsing with Opera Mini and using GMail. On the plus side, I've written Python programs both for and on my E5 (the QWERTY keyboard is pretty nice) and you'll be able to do the same, unlike with a featurephone.