Ubuntu Edge - Less than 24 hours left, $20 million to go | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu Edge - Less than 24 hours left, $20 million to go

indiegogo.com

99 pointshmottestad68 comments

They kinda screwed it up. They should have went for something more reasonable like 8-10 mil.

One of the rationalization was that 32 million funding goal or 40k devices would give the market validation. But they ignored the part where they are a new player in a very saturated existing market, with a new unproven device.

The plan to only sell device through indigogo is also silly. It kinda back-fired from the intended goal. They thought that having it exclusive to IG would help it make it a successful campaign. I don't see why couldn't they also make it available through Ubuntu shop and sell it in the future like Nexus.

Anyways, it easy to find mistakes when things don't work out as planned. But I genuinely hope, they rethink the brain-fart idea to not sell it if they don't meet the funding goal.

I question whether this was anything more than a way to test the waters and see if people would actually put up some money. Maybe they can use this as a benchmark to at least get some leverage with suppliers, and then set a more realistic goal for fundraising.

That sounds really dubious since Mark Shuttleworth explicitly said that there is'nt going to be an Edge if it fails to reach its funding goal. To me it sounds more like Canonical got over-realistic with their target. May be they got in the line of thinking that 40K devices are pinch of a much larger Ubuntu community that exists.

There isn't going to be an Edge, but there could well be other models of phones for Ubuntu.

Asking for 30+ million to test the waters is kind of a stretch in my opinion.

Well I just mean setting a bar so high that if you raise the money, great, it's worth a shot! If you don't, you can at least gauge interest and decide if you want to revise and be a bit more realistic.

Maybe they don't want to invest their own money in a very competitive market. If they order smaller number of devices their BOM can easily reach the sale price, so $32 millions sound huge sum, but in fact are not.

I fully agree with that.

Maybe they knew what they were doing and the whole thing was to get valuable market data (and also free press). With that data, they probably become more credible in negotiations with carriers. So it's still a win for everybody.

I was in Shenzhen in the spring, and there are many companies offering to make electronics for you. Minimum Order Quantity 1000. Many phones were available for under $200 that looked fairly deluxe, clones of the Samsung Note 2 and Galaxy 3, as well as some with more features like FM, TV, Dual Sim.

Why did this project need to raise so much money? And why so high of a price for the handset? I think that this project would have succeeded with lower goals. We are reaching what Bunnie Huang suggested, the era where screens are pixel-filled, batteries are long lasting and improvements are incremental. http://boingboing.net/2011/09/27/bunnie-huang-the-best-days-...

Surely they could have done a phone in the $300-$400 range?

Lots of phones that look good, yes. I have one of the SIII clones, and while it's good value for money, and looks exactly like a Samsung (down to the wallpaper/screen saver, and optional fake Samsung logo if you want it) all the models I have seen are cheaper for a reason. E.g build quality and performance are substantially lower end than Samsungs originals.

You can get iPhone clones too, down to about $20. Naturally they're nothing like the real deal - the cheapest are feature-phones, and you'll find quite a few Android phones, some even with a skin mimicking iOS...

In other words, going by looks tells you nothing in that market.

Phone models that are actually Samsung level quality also cost about as much as the Samsung phones do in equivalent quantities.

(Dual SIM is pretty much "standard" on the Chinese phones - some have up to at least 4 SIM's)

Then, presumably, it wouldn't be any different from other phones that exist on the market already, which completely defeats the point. This project is for better phone hardware, not just "Ubuntu on a phone" for which you can already run the development preview on existing phones.

But I agree with gregpilling. Why did they have to add all of those untested features to the spec. Is sapphire glass really better or is it just a fancy sounding gimmick? And what's up with "Silicon-anode Li-ion?" More RAM sounded good to me and the whole ubuntu in your pocket thing also sounds great, but premium pricing and new hardware technologies that are unproven worry me.

Is sapphire glass really better or is it just a fancy sounding gimmick? And what's up with "Silicon-anode Li-ion?" More RAM sounded good to me and the whole ubuntu in your pocket thing also sounds great

As far as I understand, that was the entire point. To see if that stuff was worthwhile in a phone. To push the boundaries. If all that stuff was a gimme, then phones would already have it.

Presumably there were certain feature requirements for it to work as an effective desktop computer that are missing on many smart phones.

I mean, the early adopters paying for the Edge are probably have desktops with quad-core 1GHz+ processors, 2GB+ of RAM, 100GB+ of hard disk space, connector and graphics card for a WSXGA+ resolution monitor, USB host capability and so on. My smart phone has none of these features.

Sapphire glass is incredibly scratch-proof. And with a full desktop OS running in there, the battery is going to need all the help it can get.

That's the real problem. They're selling a premium phone, and many people don't want a premium phone purchased at a premium price.

Sapphire glass will be used on several new upcoming high-end smartphones, and is already used by Vertu. So, yes, it is just a fancy sounding gimmick and will be commonplace in 2014.

Sapphire glass is far from being a 'fancy sounding gimmick'.

It is, in fact, the "transparent aluminum" from Star Trek. Which was an elaborate joke on the fact that pure aluminum oxide is harder than anything except elemental boron and diamond.

Keep emery boards away from your sapphire screen and it simply will not scratch. I can't wait, personally, and have been disappointed that the camera lens on iPhones is not yet sapphire since the 4.

Sounds gimmicky to me:

http://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/sapphire-versus-goril...

I haven't heard many people complain about scratches on their smartphone screens, but I have seen a lot of people operating phones with shattered screens.

I'm sorry if I was being unclear. By "Fancy sounding gimmick" I meant it's not something that special. Many quality watches have used sapphire for a long time, and the use on phones is a result of scaling up production.

Scratch resistance is not the only measure of a desirable screen material. It has to bend and resist breaking due to flexing and impact. Sapphire is unlikely to take over all phone screens because it is unlikely to have superior properties for all parameters.

All true. As I mentioned, camera lenses would be the biggest improvement. Likely universal within a year or two.

Despite that, I believe this is already the most money ever pledged to a crowdfunding project?

Pebble raised $10,266,844

Ubuntu Edge currently $12,243,447

Star Citizen is at over $15 million. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/

It's indeed sad to see this die but frankly it didn't stand a chance from the very beginning. $32 million is way too ambitious.

I would have been tempted to pay for this, if it was going through.

But with it clearly not going to go through, I wasn't going to put several hundred dollars in, just to get it back again two weeks later.

I wonder how many others thought the same way.

But I think part of the purpose of all of this is to prove to phone manufacturers that there is a demand.

If you put your money in for a couple weeks and then got it back, you'd be contributing toward that goal. And it sounds like that's a goal that maybe you care about, since you were tempted to pay for it.

I'm in the same boat.

The idea that Canonical was just testing the market with this crowd funding effort, and that they are using it to prove demand to carriers is absolutely ridiculous! A failed crowd funding campaign is not good publicity. I would bet that after this a significant number of the persons/organizations who pledged will not pledge so easily again.

I would love if this phone saw the light of day. But Canonical were way too ambitious with this campaign. They should have asked for less money, and gotten a majority of it from large investors. But I guess they didn't want to give up any stake in the venture.

I'm imagining Canonical might chip in the remaining money at the last minute?

Mark Shuttleworth has specifically said that he will not do that. From the Reddit AMA:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...

"Lots of folks have speculated I might close the gap if it's close. But I think that would not be in the spirit of the project; rather I would hope someone smarter than me will come up with a better concept that DOES get greenlighted, because I really believe in the idea of crowdsourcing the signal to innovation."

I understand that he said this, and I think that he is being honest, but just to point out: if he was secretly planning on bailing it out at the last minute, saying that you will pick up any slack is probably not a good way to run a crowd funding campaign.

It ain't over 'till it's over. Shuttleworth won't "close the gap", but there are plenty of other wealthy people who might really, really want this to succeed. I'm still hopeful.

These hardware projects emphasize the product look (and by implication the feel) way too much. The Edge here looks super slick, cool to the touch, and pleasantly heavy, with perfectly smooth edges. The same was true of Ouya and its controller on kickstarter.

But making perfect hardware is hard, and in fact the finished product would never be so delightful. It'd be more realistic to offer lower-fidelity mockups instead of those beautifully rendered images.

But I guess "realistic" doesn't sell.

Considering ALL of the contribution packages with limits are claimed in the remaining hours, which would be:

3920000$ + 420000$ = 4340000$,

for the funding to succeed; 15422386$ worth of other contributions have to also be made. That is:

771119,3 Founder or, 514079,5 Forgot International Shipping :) or, 308447,4 Founder With Style or,

more reasonably;

22190 Ubuntu Edge or, 2203 Enterprise Starter Kit contributions in just under 20 hours.

Anyone wanna bet?

Unrelated question, but where are you from? I've not seen anyone write numbers quite like this before. It's sort of french, but sort of not...

Quite some countries use commas as decimal marks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Countries_using_Ar...

It's just European without using thousand markers, right?

he probably copypasted it from a spreadsheet/calculator that just rounded the decimal.

If the funding succeeded, I'm not sure how many company will actually let employee use this phone/desktop at work.

Losing the phone is a lot scarier now.

Scarier than losing a company laptop?

which one is more likely? loosing a phone or a laptop?

Having never lost a phone or a laptop, I don't know.

While a phone is smaller, it's something most people check frequently, and typically notice if it's missing quickly.

Plus, don't most phones have email, which is almost as bad as the documents stored on a computer, because most of them are sent over email?

695 plus taxes(and in Europe it is at least 21-23%) is lots of money for a phone.

Why they don't finance it? It is the only way normal people could buy it.

The price was including taxes (VAT), and I guess they would ship it from UK to European backers, with no duties inside the European union.

I agree that the price was high, but not higher than for other phones in the same market segment (comparable hardware and such). The problem with the price is that it wasn't very attractive either. A new, untested phone 9 months from now, for the same price and with comparable hardware to currently existing phones.

IMO finance is not a good idea for this sort of thing - it would only encourage people to buy something they can't really afford. This is a luxury even in the modern era of smartphones being commonplace, nobody needs to have it.

It seems to me that your definition of 'normal people' makes bankers happy, as normal people then pay a lot of money in interest.

How much of the phone will work without non-free firmware? For example GTA04 still requires non-free firmware for Wi-Fi and 3D: http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/page/FAQ/#wikitit...

I wonder how much interest Indiegogo are making right now? Do they share that with Canonical?

That's an ambitious goal for crowd sourcing...

It's such a shame to see this go away. I really found the idea of carrying around a desktop OS in your pocket really fascinating.

It's sad to see this die :(. Hope it will rise from ashes some day.

It was badly formulated in the first place. Ubuntu on phones is interesting because it's Ubuntu, not because some team with no previous track record in hardware wants to build a high-end phone. Making it about the hardware was unnecessary. How many of you would have bought a pre-configured Ubuntu phone on any decent existing ODM hardware platform?

I don't just want Ubuntu on my phone. I want my main Ubuntu desktop running on my phone, so that I can take it with me, with just an external monitor and keyboard needed at my desk. To make that experience really great, we need better phone hardware.

Many existing phones have hdmi-out, and can connect to Bluetooth keyboards and mice. Some also have USB-to-go. There was nothing new in the Edge hardware that would enhance that.

"We’ll choose the fastest available multi-core processor, at least 4GB of RAM and a massive 128GB of storage."

My point is that smartphones today would still be a bit sluggish when used for typical desktop tasks. While basic browsing would be OK, I want to be able open thirty tabs simultaneously like I do on my desktop. And (in my case) run a compiler. Etc.

With a projected ship date of May (and who really expected it would hit that, even if it were funded?), the gap would have been narrow at best. It would be over a year after the Galaxy S4 shipped with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, and probably 6 months after the expected iPhone 5S ships with currently-unknown specs.

You're comparing it to the current generation of smartphones. It's shipping with the next generation.

Completely agreed - I couldn't care less what Canonical thinks about phone hardware, unless that includes all of the hardware being completely open. I just want a replacement for my N900, and supported w/community rather than hacked together.

I just want proper Gnutils and to be able to port Linux apps over after writing a little QML. I also want to be able to use languages other than Objective-C and Java. Jolla and Ubuntu are the only candidates right now.

Yes, kind of a pity, but we still have all this to start with, and I'm really happy for it: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices

Yeah, that's not Kickstarter. They're keeping that money.

False. The money is returned if the funding doesn't reach the goal. From the FAQ:

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.

I asked the last time around, but didn't get an answer: who's on the hook for the $300,000 in non-refundable credit card fees incurred by this project? Kickstarter's page on this is unclear.

Kickstarter's page is probably very unclear on the policies of Indiegogo. Indiegogo only accepts PayPal for "fixed funding" campaigns.

[0]: http://support.indiegogo.com/entries/20492953-Fees-Pricing-

[1]: http://support.indiegogo.com/entries/20566503-Fixed-vs-Flexi...

I thought they only charge your card if the project was successfully funded, so if it didn't reach its goal then no fees were charged in the first place.

Ah no. It's Fixed Funding.

This campaign will only receive funds if at least $32,000,000 is raised by its deadline.

Indiegogo offers two funding choices. Fixed and Flexi. Fixed is like Kickstarter. In flexi, you'll get what you just got.

"Fixed Funding

This campaign will only receive funds if at least $32,000,000 is raised by its deadline. Funding duration: July 22, 2013 - August 21, 2013 (11:59pm PT)."

This campaign will only receive funds if at least $32,000,000 is raised by its deadline. Funding duration: July 22, 2013 - August 21, 2013 (11:59pm PT).

No, this is a Fixed Funding campaign.

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