Ubuntu Touch: First look at the Linux smartphone OS

The iPhone got me excited for a reinvention of mobile ui.

Reading about andrioid's ideas tickled the architecture nerd in me so hard I was on board even when it still looked like a jacked-up blackberry.

Ubuntu phone looks like an also-ran, Canonical's attempt to get some of that sweet sweet app store revenue. That's fine; it's just not a case for adoption of the platform.

It took android a long time to finally hit its stride, and that wasn't for doing all the things that excited me about the platform, it was the commoditization of a luxury. Windows Phone is struggling, is there room in the market for another platform to enter this marketplace?

There are interesting aspects to the Ubuntu phone, but without any big selling point I wonder if they're not better suited just getting rolled into Android proper. Canonical has had widely varying degrees of success when they make hard breaks from the current opensource answer for something (and plenty of dragons lurk down the tailored-android approach too). I hope it works out for them because Ubuntu is an important force in opensource and I'd hate to see Canonical die out.

However, nobody seems to be looking at what gave Android a big technology advantage even back when Android was a design ugly duckling: A common managed language runtime for apps and OS middleware.