Ubuntu Edge price dropped to $695
indiegogo.com
indiegogo.com
1. It's getting wishy-washy. I don't know any campaigns that have changed around rewards this much (both pricing and what you get) and for many people that may be a turn off. Why would someone get the phone at $695 when it could go down more? Obviously the said the price won't go down but they had said that previously when they were above $700.
2. $695 immediately withdrawn from your PayPal account prior to tha campaign succeeding is a hard pill to swallow for many even if you are refunded 100% if (when?) the goal is not reached.
3. May 2014 is a pretty long time from now and I bet the wait will end up being longer (I waited almost 1.25 years for my Leap Motion and they had significant VC backing). Too many people may not be able to think this far ahead.
Why did I back the project? Well, I liked the idea of making a custom hardware device and thought crowdfunding the creation was interesting. I've never actually used Ubuntu (or Android for that matter) but the scale of the goal and the precedent it could set for people doing very capital-intensive projects with crowdfunding was what motivated me to back it.
Because everybody that paid more is being refunded. See the notes on each of the events. It won't go down anymore, but even if that happened, you'd not be screwed for supporting the campaign earlier.
> the scale of the goal and the precedent it could set for people doing very capital-intensive projects with crowdfunding was what motivated me to back it.
I'd also support it just on that basis alone, but I'm also looking forward to have a well supported and familiar Linux distribution on a phone.
edit: please don't let me be misunderstood.
So then it does make sense from a fundraising perspective.
What they should have done, perhaps, was go to Bloomberg et al before going public with this. Starting out with $500k in the pot and strong corporate backing locking the price (or at least making the tiers predictable) would have gone a long way.
It's also hard to predict what having an initial perk of $500 would have meant to the campaign. The very strong reaction in the first day is also a result of supporters observing that there was a gap of $230 for the next price level. It's not easy to really tell what an entirely different price structure would have meant.
Either way, very interesting to watch it unfold.
On the other hand, they've always refunded any extra money that people have paid. Ultimately, if the price subsequently goes up, you have a good deal, if the price subsequently goes down, you get the extra money back. The re-adjustment does no harm to the consumer.
I'd be surprised if even half of the people that pledged early on are able to keep up with all of the changes and updates.
I find it a little disturbing they're claiming it will work on Verizon (my current carrier for the past 10 years) and Sprint for a few reasons:
1) It's unlikely Verizon will have VoLTE on day 1 that the phone comes out. Even if so, one has to hope they become more liberal with what they allow on their network. Since it does not have any CDMA radio, that could also be a problem as LTE is not universal yet on their network as well.
2) Sprint does not let users actually know they have sim cards. My friend's Sprint Galaxy Nexus has the sim card embedded directly in the device and cannot be seen/removed. If that continues to be true with newer Sprint Phones, it seems like it would be hard to get a sim card compatible with Sprint's network.
3) #2 Assumes that Sprint has VoLTE, let alone much of an LTE network. As far as I know, it's still in testing at best and not ready for mainstream use.
I can just predict a lot of angry Verizon and Sprint users come early next year when they try to pop in the sim card to their device or call their carrier and find out they cannot use the phone on their desired network. Canonical really should be more up front with their claims of the networks that it will (realistically) work on.
We have 3 major mobile careers in my country (Vodafone, Orange and Cosmote), and my unlocked Android can work on all of them, whether we are talking about GSM, Edge, 3G, LTE, doesn't matter. And oh, you should see the pre-pay offers that we get.
How the US - just a single country (its size doesn't matter) - managed to end up with multiple competing standards continues to make my mind boggle, whilst Europe we managed to lock things down to a common set of standards right across the continent.
I'm guessing it had to do with Qualcomm being a US company and having the advantage for obtaining contracts and influence from politicians and other bureaucrats at the time CDMA and GSM were being standardized and developed. CDMA originated with Qualcomm and GSM was mostly developed by companies outside of the US (I think starting in Finland).
I don't recall a company in Berlin building out networks in Greece, but that's the equivalent of what McCaw Cellular was doing in the late 80s/early 90s
1. Backing this project is using your dollars to "vote" for this device to exist. It's not as unimaginative as "buying a phone", it's about helping to establish a new mobile device os as a real alternative.
2. This type of fundraising rarely follows a linear growth curve, so there's nothing to infer about the ultimate success of the project by projecting that way.
I have not backed the project, and I'm not sure if I will, but I really appreciate that others are trying to make this happen.
To other commenters: if you see this as "buying a phone that doesn't exist yet and won't for at least another year", then this project is probably not meant for you anyway.
It runs a slow and ugly UI, comes with built-in Amazon ads and privacy concerns, and will drain battery rapidly when using as a desktop, so you won't be able to make a call when your car breaks down on the way home.
If this is the future, count me out.
I'm running Ubuntu right now and love it. I do wish that it didn't come with Amazon by default, but as a free OS, I accept that there's going to be some of that sort of thing happening.
Regarding battery, I was under the impression that it would charge when being used as a desktop. Is this not correct?
It's not even implemented in an intuitive or user-friendly way. When you search your computer, you don't expect Amazon search results to randomly appear.
Compare the Ubuntu dash search to Spotlight on OSX, it looks very amateurish. Instead of improving it, their developers have to waste their time fudging Amazon search results in.
Why so particular with Ubuntu, do you e.g. distrust (and stop using) Google for displaying ads? What about Windows/OSX which are orders of magnitude less trust-able than an open source OS. If you don't like a more mainstream consumer Linux then why not install Arch or Debian or Bodhi and refrain from badmouthing?
The vast majority of Linux distributions are free and include none of this sort of things, with some of them (e.g. Debian) having been in continuous existence for about 20 years. Whatever your opinion about this move by Ubuntu, you can't say that it's something that has to happen with free OSes and that you have to accept.
There's a missing apostrophe there. It's "free" in that it doesn't come with a price-tag. It's being paid for, just in other ways. It might seem nit-picky, but to me, at least, it's an important distinction. Facebook is "free" also, but you're paying for it by looking at ads. Google search/email is "free", but you pay for it with ads.
I personally hate the idea that something is "free" but you pay for it with your time/eyeballs. In some regards (like this) I am old-school. I like the simple model of I pay $X for Y product, done.
I don't really agree with the mentality of "ad-supported is not free". It's one thing if you're giving up your data (as in the case of Facebook), it's another if it's limited to glancing at an ad (in the case of a blog or newspaper). I don't know the details of where Ubuntu would fall, but if you define merely "looking at something" as payment, you should be asking for refunds from any man or woman you've ever "paid".
I don't think the people working there are incompetent, more likely overstretched to breaking point.
Unity on desktop is very, very good.
Unity on the phone (running on my nexus 4) is blazingly fast. I mean, stupidly fast. Android and iOS feel super laggy compared to it. Particularly Android.
Just seems like you are trolling.
Even some of their ubuntu one storage engineers know graphics programming well enough to win game programming competitions. They're good, and have copious free time to make this perfect.
They are not using Python for the phone version, but something coming from QT that runs at native speed.
I used to subscribe to the linux sub-reddit but left because of all the Canonical apologists, "But they're nowhere near as bad as Microsoft/Apple/Google" and "They've got to make money somehow, what's wrong with anonymous search statistics being sent to Amazon?" etc etc.
Seriously, working on something for a while until you get it into a state where you're happy releasing it to the world isn't an attack on Freedom. Especially when you GPL it once you do release it.
The built-in Amazon ads are enough for me to not use it, however.
Canonicals downfall has been long and well-documented. Try to keep up.
When in desktop mode, you will be plugged into A/C power.
Maybe this kind of expensive, high volume devices shows the limits of crowdfunding? Have there been similar projects crowdfunded already (similar price/target)?
Specs today promised for 2014 don't mean much to me, its a seven hundred dollar bet against what other smart phone makers are doing. Considering the speed at which that segment moves its not a bet I am willing to make.
I also believe in their vision of converging different device classes in the software space, although I'm not sure they'll be the ones succeeding in it.
In light of JBQ's quitting AOSP[1], how open is open enough? Will we be happy if we get "free check" license to use the binary blobs? Will we be happy if we can see the code but not be able to copy it? Do we require them to publish drivers and their source code in a permissive license? Many people will think it is a "shades of gray" issue. I kind of want more convenience than rms promises but on the surface it seems silly to think we can have the freedom and openness from Canonical where a bigger (financially) Google has so miserably failed. Perhaps our interests are more aligned with Canonical than with Google? Thoughts?
For instance, the Raspberry Pi has a binary blob of firmware that contains a lot of the code for using with the graphics hardware. While we can't modify or recompile this part, the (minimalistic) interface to this firmware is an open source kernel module. This allows you to build newer or modified kernels, and build other distributions for the RPi and still have access to the graphics acceleration. I consider this "open enough."
While Android is fairly open, there is a large part of it still that is closed source. This includes the front-ends of Google's own services (I consider back ends out of scope), binary drivers (graphics), binary firmware (radio) and binary libraries (OpenGL implementations, closely linked to graphics drivers).
The goal of Canonical's project is also to make the drivers and OpenGL part open source, but I've not seen anything about the radio bits.
That's pretty impressive in my opinion and meeting the deadline is hard, but it can still happen.
But I agree, it's looking highly unlikely that they'll meet the goal unless the timeframe is extended.
I just don't see it happening. They won't even hit the half.
source: http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012#category
ps: There's a lack of a good verb tense for something that could happen but it is unlikely, there's no good pessimistic subjunctive future.
"Were it to happen ...." ?
Maybe having a billionaire with his hand out holding a tin cup shows that people aren't such big suckers as Shuttleworth anticipated?
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/scanadu-scout-the-first-me...
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper...
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-...
- They all add significant rewards (i.e., not shirts) at lower tiers (you got an ouya for $100, pebble for $110 and scanadu for $270).
- They add much lower targets (the ouya had the highest at $950 000)
- Even the pebble, most successful of the three, "only" raised $10 millions.
The Edge wants more than three times that for something that's arguably less innovative (yet another smartphone) and wants us to bet no less than $700 on it (the lower tiers are basically charity).
I have had one person suggest that it was the cost of FCC approval that was the holdup and not the technology. Any company that could afford the approval process would not want to open their design. I am not technically versed enough to know if this is correct, however.
Does anyone else have a clear perspective on the issue?
A more serious problem is trying to get all the relevant firmware and radio software stack without tripping over IP that is (a) patented and (b) will only be licensed to you under NDA. Qualcomm are particularly bad at this. So you need to choose a suitable SoC with favourable IP licensing.
Writing your own "baseband" is a substantial piece of work; some people have embarked on it at http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/
Canonical's approach is sound here and their costs are realistic. Getting it done for free by people working in their spare time is very unlikely to happen.
I actually question what the Canonical is doing when it comes to this. I bought Asus EEE with preinstalled Ubuntu 12.04 recently, and it's great. However, you cannot upgrade to 12.10 because the proprietary video driver for X is missing. So what they're thinking? If they want people to switch to Ubuntu (and I would love that, that's why I bought this netbook), then they have to commit to it as a long term goal.
It seems that everybody is so impatient nowadays that if success doesn't happen in one year, they kill the project.
They should have gone to an ODM or lower-tier OEM and piggybacked on an the unit volume for some other customer. They could have launched with 20k units pre-sold.. They also could have had a far shorter lead time, so the risk in pledging would be much lower.
If they think they can change the world with hardware, they've got that wrong. The interesting thing about an Ubuntu phone is Ubuntu.
I don't think they are looking to launch a viable handset business.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...
"But we'll stick to the concept-car side of things leaving mainstream production to our partners in the industry who do it very well." - Mark Shuttleworth
Or is it?
Then started working like mad on getting out a nice, user friendly, hackable OS to early adopters.
It's all in the OS, especially since nobody knows how the specs of the planned phone will compare to next year's models.
On the other hand, remember what phones were like before the iPhone? Creating something that blew away the current market worked well there.
If they reach their funding goal, but then miss their delivery date, or the device has a pathetic battery life, or the device overheats in your hand and shuts down the moment you try to use the "fastest CPU", what then? Or if the CPU /GPU ends up being so slow (to prevent thermal meltdown) that you can't run interesting desktop-class applications, as opposed to using an OS and applications optimized for embedded/mobile hardware, as opposed to laptop class hardware, what then?
Call me unconvinced.
Either way the next couple of days will be make or break, if this last price change doesn't get any significant contribution in short time, I don't think they can reach the target anymore.
I was there. I've overlooked the spreadsheets with component parts, and people having phone calls and debating about how to possibly lower the cost even more. I can also say that getting to $695 wasn't straightforward at all. We all love a bit of conspiracy, but please allow a bit of credit to the people trying to pull it off.
I am glad to be wrong.
Having thousands donate at $800 and the refunding the difference down to $695 means that the "target" is met but the actual net amount is lowered by that amount that needs to be refunded.
It doesn't actually help them meet the lowered target either, it simply lowers the target while getting them no closer to the target by lowering their effective amount raised at the same time.
That's why I don't think it was planned. It feels to me less planned and more reacting to not meeting their target but reacting in a not so clever way.
The thing is, if they can't keep steady during the fund-raising part I don't trust them to deliver on the hard part of building the hardware.
Either way I also don't believe this is in any way really connected to lower component price deals, this is marketing but in my opinion it's not clever marketing.
You don't have to believe it, but it is true.
I can imagine this scenario going on: They got a bit scared to loose the project altogether. Brainstormed ways to inject some buzz into the fundraiser. A pricedrop was one of the possibilities (it also lowers the barrier to pledge). Conveniently it was also somewhat true because early indications from suppliers. They lowered their expectations from "We want to build the best fucking phone possible" to "We want to build the best phone with great hardware"
Nothing wrong with that but dropping the price is still marketing ;)
What he needs is to prove there's a market. They are still short of this goal by a large margin. The price drop helps toward this goal.
Can I `gcc-arm -o MyApp main.c` on my PC and run MyApp on any Ubuntu Edge phone, without having to unlock them or enable them for dev or any other nonsense? Or is development restricted to QML and HTML5?
In other words, will the user have a harder time using it than using a QML/HTML5 app? I could see that be if only QML/HTML5 integrate well with the phone interface.
"What if you fail to reach the funding target?
We appreciate every bit of support we receive during the 30 days, and every backer will be welcomed into the Ubuntu community. If we don’t reach our target then we will focus only on commercially available handsets and there will not be an Ubuntu Edge. All contributions will be fully refunded."
This could cost indiegogo a lot.
It would be a disaster for them if they got into a position were they had costs of $1500 per phone and had to choose between bailing out or eat the losses.
No one wants to be the guy who stuck $700 down for something that will never exist because they were the only ones to pledge.
If it weren't for the fixed model, they would struggle to get even a fraction of the money they've raised so far.
I also thought about this, but I'm not sure that's the case. At the very least, they managed to collect close to $10 million in a a two week period, without much of an advertising budget and only some vague on-paper specs and a few renders.
I think that gives them some leverage when negotiating with manufacturers to show that there is at least some demand for high-priced smartphones running their software stack.
Dan Ariely did some studies[1] showing that people are much more likely to pick something when there is a strictly worse option available. $830 vs. $600 for the exact same thing is just easier for our irrational minds to compare than $695 for a phone next year vs. phones today. I think this was a major motivator for people to "buy" in the early stages of the project, especially since it was a time limited option.
I personally backed at the $600 level, and while I have a lot of reasons for why it was a good idea, I suspect that I was influenced my own irrational behavior and I am just good at justifying my decisions.
[1] http://realityswipe.wordpress.com/tag/dan-ariely/
P.S. If you haven't read any of Dan Ariely's stuff before, he does some fascinating studies showing how irrational humans are.
I maintain that this could've succeeded if it was priced at $600 from the beginning, and work their way from that regarding the specs. That's exactly what Ford did, too. He started with a price in mind, and then forced the engineers to come up with a product that fits that price.
Canonical repeated Motorola's Xoom mistake, by starting with the specs, and then selling for whatever price it all added up to.
They marketed and priced it for high-end consumers...and then ask these same customers do something that none of them ever want to do...wait. Wait a long time for delivery.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Drop the price or up the delivery date. Better if they did both.
I'd also have more faith if I could have seen a functional prototype not just a couple of Nexus4's running alpha software. I'm not paying 800 bucks for the free software...I'm paying for hardware which is still on the drawing board.
(Disclaimer: I'm no materials engineer and the above info was sourced from google searching, so take that for what it's worth)
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512411/your-next-smartp...
Of course those are low volume, luxury handsets and if one shatters they probably just replace it, but I don't think 2014 is "too early" for a more widespread sapphire display by any means.
Wayland + systemd + pulseaudio + QT... they're working with the Linux community instead of against it.
I assume I'll be able to both write and execute Go code under Ubuntu desktop mode. What about Ubuntu mobile OS?
Will the device support WebGL? What about OpenGL|ES and regular OpenGL?
Does switching between Ubuntu desktop mode and Ubuntu mobile OS involve a reboot with separate systems, or it is one environment with 2 different interfaces? Thank you!