Ubuntu smartphone offers alternative to apps
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Because unlike a year and a half ago when they tried the Edge, hardware is (almost) ready for it.
The next generation of monitors, PC's, phones and tablets will all have USB 3.1 Type C ports. These are true docking ports, able to supply 100W of power, and transmit DisplayPort, PCIExpress and USB simultaneously.
You'll only have a single cable connected between your laptop and your monitor, with power, keyboard, mouse, network, printer, et cetera plugged into the monitor.
We've been able to do that before, but it's always been expensive and/or proprietary.
But what's really new is that this same cable will also be able to plug into your phone, letting you replace the laptop with a phone.
See https://plus.google.com/108554416426692294217/posts/cokrihiE... for desktop-style window management in Unity 8 (Unity 8 is the Ubuntu Phone shell).
However, I'm not an Ubuntu developer; I just follow their work. So this could be wrong.
PC prices and performance have stagnated because most people are deeming the low end of the market "powerful enough", and so mobile devices are rapidly catching up.
As much as cloud services help gloss over the effect of moving from device to device, there is still plenty of state on my devices, and it would be great to have all of that state in one place, and then it needs to be on the smallest device.
My laptop is on its way to becoming a dumb terminal anyway: I keep less and less state on it, because I don't always have it with me. My phone on the other hand is always in my pocket.
I actually have everything I need for most of my work on my phone: several reasonable Office productivity softwares (including the official Office mobile), a tabbed terminal window with ssh, a browser.
My phone has 3d acceleration, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (with an sd card slot so I could bump it up). The resolution it operates at 1080x1920 or something ridiculous and more than sufficient for desktop needs.
It has a usb port I can hook up to a hub for keyboard and mouse and it supports MHL so I can mirror the screen on a decent monitor.
Hell, if I stick under my hand it's a decent touchpad interface and my Note 3 even has pen input so I could use it as an "artist tablet".
The problem is of course not hardware, but software. The hardware is more than sufficient, the apps are functionally capable, but they lack the right kind of UI metaphor to make it work as a desktop.
It's so close, but somehow so far.
It's all pretty seamless from our issued computers, but it's a pain inducing minefield trying to do anything outside of that.
It's just a rMBP, so it's not like I'm huffing around a 12lb Dell monster or anything. But it seems kind of pointless when the computer in my pocket is good enough technologically for most things.
My recent experience with the Android 5 "upgrade" on my Nexus tablet, which broke things I was using, really drove home to me that I really just want a Linux, like Raspbian or something, that runs on a phone or small tablet. Entertainment apps are nice and all, but I really want a general purpose computer, which happens to have a keyboard emulation on screen when not docked via USB or Bluetooth with keyboards, monitors and such.
... aside: the Android 5 Lollipop experience really made me appreciate RMS's stance on proprietary software. My command line tool app? gone. My Quickoffice notes? gone. Easy access to frequent peripheral settings? not gone, but buried deeper in the menus. More advertising noise ("notices") on the home screen. Scroogled!
I want an open mobile device, even if I realize not everybody wants the power and responsibility to maintain and/or break their own device.
I also have no idea what is going on in the mobile space right now. My N5 can barely handle Android 5 and the iPhones I've played with are not much better. My old ipad 3 can barely run iOS8 and Apple does not allow me to go back to 7. The specs on these devices are at the point where they exceed computers running XP and Office not too long ago. There's something very wrong with mobile today. The bloat is here to stay and Google and Apple just seem to be re-inventing PCs, but in the worst way imaginable - tacking on random crap every update and throwing more and more handware at the problem.
I'm more than willing to forgive a lot of the Win8 missteps if Win10 is good out of the gate. Especially if MS finally gets its security act together. I still dont understand why in this day and age my email or browser will deliver an unsigned exe to me, at least without explicitly allowing that. Or why my internet-facing apps aren't strictly sandboxed. Or why there isn't a built-in IPS system that can stop attacks as patches are pending.
>RMS's stance on proprietary software.
I think its unfair to peg this as a FOSS vs proprietary battle, especially considering AOSP is open source. I think the chasing of the mighty mobile buck is sending these systems into the toilet. When your main motivator is pushing out viral apps to low information and low attention users, then the product will of course be sub-par. MS has the incentive to produce a ecosystem that is more based on production than consumption and that's why I think they'll win in the end. Consumption devices really won't satifsy my use cases. Its a real shame Shuttleworth has moved towards the consumption model.
You simply do not control your Surface / iOS hardware. You have no power over it. You cannot run what you want on it, and you are stuck with the operating system given you, with any changes they make. You are completely at their mercy.
It is probably a nightmare world for Richard Stallman to know people eagerly line up to buy these things.
It appears FirefoxOS is our last best hope (for open devices running open code). Unfortunately I'd be more interested in a system like the original Ubuntu vision than what I understand FOS to be (not that it's a problem that Moz makes the product they want - it's just not the product I want). Maybe the kernel/init/rootfs of FOS can provide a solid foundation for a fork, along with a supply of actual hw to run the thing on. Unlike ASOP/replicant which only works on a small subset of devices despite the GPL protection of the kernel.
On the application front you can develop HTML5 or native (QML) apps. There's more info on developer.ubuntu.com. You can easily side-load applications etc.
The hardware thing is basically the same situation as with FirefoxOS. So that might be to your taste or not.
It is certainly not the kind of tech one wants or needs to drive a converged device.
Hopefully Canonical gets less stupid in the coming months and finds a higher end hardware partner to ship that converged experience, because early adopters have been able to do it on their Nexus phones running Ubuntu Touch for over a year.
I feel as though the entire market is screaming for something obvious to exist. It's so obvious, so compelling, so useful...
And so far away.
Why do we even have "desktops" and "laptops" and "phones" and "tablets" and "wearable watches" and so forth? Actually, the rise of the wearable watch gives us the biggest clue: it's because we care about form factors.
When I'm on the subway, I want something to hold in my hand. When I'm in a big hurry or on a jog, I want to glance at something on my wrist. When I'm in bed but don't want to disturb my partner, I want to interact with a larger yet personal tablet. When I want to type something (including code) or interact with content in more involved ways, I want something with a mouse and a keyboard. When I want to have a state of the art immersion experience, I want something with a lot of horsepower (and preferably a head mounted display of some sort).
Why do I have to have different computers for all of this when all I want is different I/O modalities (and related computing expansion devices)? Why do we keep ignoring the fact that what we want is the ability to experience our virtual world in the input / output environment that suits us at this moment? Everything else is secondary.
I was so excited when the original Ubuntu Edge was announced, because I felt that FINALLY someone had figured out how to make the thing we've all been screaming for. But now I'm not so sure Canonical really "got it" after all. If they did, it would have been the first feature they kept, not the first one they cut. To even call it a "feature" is diminutive. It's a paradigm that wants to exist.
We've seen already with the Motorola Atrix that it's harder than it sounds to get this right. But why is it THIS hard? Why can't we start with a phone that can be the CPU for wearables and tablets, and that can dock into a higher horsepower "GPU station" with a mouse and a keyboard and a monitor when we need it? You don't have to nail the performance profile as much as you have to nail why the experience is obviously better. I argue that you don't need a supercomputer in your pocket to pull that off.
Is it just me on this, or what?
Batteries. Running a full Ubuntu OS on a smartphone battery would result in the battery draining quickly. So instead you'd need some sort of dual boot phone OS and desktop OS system that shares data... it's far from simple.
Also, from this whole argument it simply doesn't follow that one OS can't scale from IoT to mega-servers. It's just code. Not all of it has to be running all the time. Not all services have to be proffered at the same time. We can do that. It may not look like "Ubuntu desktop OS on a phone", but maybe it shouldn't. That's probably the wrong direction.
People definitely want to be able to use different form factors in different places. One way to do that would be to carry around a central GPU+Memory store. Another would be different devices interconnected through a network - and the world that's being made is the latter.
Right now I can leave off in the middle of an ebook on my tablet and pick up at the same spot on my phone (Kindle). Same with videos from my TV to my phone/tablet/computer (Plex).
It gets a little trickier with development environments, but if I was sufficiently motivated I could do everything in a VPS that I accessed remotely, or use Nitrous.io to get a web accessible IDE (though I'm not sure about using a watch for programming).
I think this is mostly prompted by the fact that on the hardware side - everything is very custom and tailored to that form factor (to keep size and weight down, we've got all these systems on a chip and custom shaped batteries).
Because a full-on SoC costs somewhere between $20 and $30? It costs almost nothing to add a full computer to any tablet/laptop form factor phone dock.
The Ubuntu Edge campaign was aimed at trying to accelerate hardware innovation for those that wanted convergence faster. We didn't make it - but it will still happen.
Separate to convergence, the "next billion" devices are mobile in some form. Ubuntu's goal is to be the free software platform available to everyone [0]. That's why we're creating a first-class phone experience. And there's still lots of room for innovation in what phones can do and how they can be central to people's lives.
So the point of today is shipping the first Ubuntu phones to users. I'm really looking forward to how people use, enjoy and develop with them.
So, well, what I need is not complicated (pretty much the opposite), but it requires "doing things right" and this is always incredibly hard. Essentially, to make proper DM it would require to hire someone, who already has written a couple of DMs which were used widely enough for mistakes made while inventing its API to become obvious. Unlikely that somebody, who isn't spying on his users would want to invest in something that big. And, furthermore, obviously there is much more people, who need Angry Birds, than people, who need transparent process interoperation.
AFAICT, because hardware makers determine the operating-system market rather than the other way around. I dreamed of a more modernized, Plan 9-like OS to ~~tie all devices together~~ RULE THEM ALL back in freshman year of college. It's simply the obvious thing to do if you're a user and enough of an OS geek to understand the idea.
But, well, we softies don't drive those markets. We could never get the effort together to produce an operating system that would both support (via hardware drivers) and be supported by (in the sense of not having to crack open your phone with a screwdriver to install the thing) all the necessary hardware platforms.
This is what I found most interesting about the device. I loved the idea of how the OS transformed when other things were attached to the phone. There were questions about background tasks and apps running, but your phone turning into your computer via a dock did make sense and seemed like the future.
It seems it was not to be, and the Ubuntu phone is going to be another device that can only run programs created specifically for it and running in some sandboxed environment.
The music player is 95% of what my phone is doing for me, yet the Nexus treats it as a second-rate concern.
I want Linux on everything, even (especially!) my toaster.
When it first came out, Windows Phone had one of the most interesting UIs out there. It combined all of your social networks into one single messaging hub, had a novel concept in tiles and the sliding panes (or whatever they were called). Unfortunately, every app maker wanted to more or less port what they were already doing on Android/iOS to Windows Phone, so few ever used the functionality MS provided. As of Windows Phone 10, it all seems to be gone.
It's a $200 device, off contract. The goal is probably just like the early firefoxOS devices - a minimal effort step to get out of the emulator and get the product into the hands of some users who aren't ubuntu enthusiasts. If the only people trying your product are the ones willing to flash their nexus devices, you're going to get kind of skewed feedback.
Anyone know why Canonical are releasing early like this? Need for volume? Desire to get feedback on the 'card' interface? Limited processor power on the target hardware?
Who is this "Ubuntu fan base"?
I connect to ten Ubuntu machines a day, and my parents use Ubuntu laptops. I don't consider myself a "fan", and my parents don't know what their OS is called. Where are these "Ubuntu faithful" the article talks about?
You don't have to be a fan to use Ubuntu (as you said) - but there are lots of people that are interested in Open Source and alternative technology options who will be excited about a new software launch. I'm sure there are fans of the colour Orange who'll be excited it's getting more coverage today! :)
One very curious thing about the scope idea is it will need tweaking for different cultures around the world. Gross oversimplification, but generally in the west we categorize by what something is, whereas in the east it's what something is for.
Interesting comment. Have you got more information or a reference? (I must be 'Eastern' as I characterise my software tools by function).
That book is slightly out of date, but details a lot of actual studies (of varying quality) into both variation in priorities of users globally and how information architecture should vary. The example that stays with me was the Chinese having a strong preference for stores that group objects based by the room the object belongs in (imagine how lamps would be sold in a department store - either all together or lamps for the kitchen in the kitchen section etc.), whereas either the Koreans or Japanese were the exact opposite, as were most western nations.
It's not a great book by any stretch, but it did persuade me that successful localization needs to consider much more than just language. Additionally working out how to invert the structure of what you're doing proves to be a useful exercise which can help improve the structure for all users.
Finally, they emphasised that these patterns change with time, and surprisingly fast. Again in China there are strong generational differences, which they put down to the economic changes.
Nice reference. The perspective is the important thing, the book is just the vehicle.
As far as I can see, all that's different about this phone is that it's using "sub-menus in the Start menu" where other stuff is using "icons on the desktop". PDAs already had this, I think.
My guess: Better support for Python. Probably also some kind of Docker support. Nothing to sneeze at.
Hopefully there's a shortcut.
EDIT:
Ahh... looks like there's a slide out shelf of quick-access "apps" from the left side.
http://www.xataka.com/moviles/ubuntu-en-smartphones-a-por-to...
And was able to use it for a few hours. Not what anyone that thought about buying an Ubuntu Edge would have expected, but anyway, a cheap way to see if that experience is really worthy to you.
I won't say if it's worthy for me yet. I've got to write about it next week :)
I see another failure in the making...