Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu One Gets iPhone App For Contact Sync
oneone writes "Canonical is bringing its Ubuntu One cloud service (which we discussed last month) to handheld devices with a new mobile contact synchronization feature that is powered by Funambol. Canonical's Ubuntu One application for the iPhone is now available from the iTunes Music Store. Android and other mobile operating systems will be supported with Funambol's standard client application. The mobile sync feature is currently in the beta testing stage but will be generally available to Ubuntu One subscribers when Ubuntu 10.04 is released later this month. Canonical says that it is boosting its Ubuntu One server infrastructure in order to support what it anticipates will be record loads."
but not for Android? open source much?
?
Android and other mobile operating systems will be supported with Funambol's standard client application.
Just so everybody is aware, the servers are quite overloaded at the moment, so expect all kinds of timeouts. We didn't expect so many testers :)
We will be slowly bringing it back in it's feet, so patience is welcomed.
And what does contact syncing between devices has to do with always-on lifestyle?
If you bothered to read past the first sentence of the summary, you'd notice that Android is mentioned as already being supported.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Are you asking about the market finding it acceptable or about it being socially acceptable? Your post isn't very, and maybe it's because, and in some cases, and in some places, this is acceptable, your comma use is, and I mean no offense, confusing, clear.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Is this the beginning of their move to (mostly) pay product model, like Red Hat did after they used the OSS community for all they could?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Always-on" is still substantially a feature of teenagers, girls especially, twitter enthusiasts, and the poor bastards responsible for keeping uptimes up; but I'd say that "always synchronized" is, if anything, an underserved demand.
At present, if you want your data to be there when you need it to be, you pretty much have to be a bit of a gearhead(not a huge gearhead by any means; knowing about dropbox is way less techy than having your own git repo or secure WebDAV share, or whatever) or you have to engage in frankly infuriating amounts of error-prone manual labour.
File propagation among the people generally is still(even among the youth) at the level of "emailing it to myself", with all the version errors and minor fuckups that that occasions. Synchronizing bookmarks? Pretty much doesn't happen. Cell contacts? unless you can swap the SIM, or have them do it for you at the store, people pretty much just retype them. Bloody dark ages stuff. Even the cases that should work by now(DLNA media sharing in a closed LAN, all devices trusted, is still rather rough around the edges). Even the trivial case of somebody who has a desktop and a notebook/netbook still isn't really there yet. You either sign up for something like Dropbox, which is easy and cheap/free; but depends on an internet connection and is potentially privacy problematic, or you drop fairly big money(Windows Home Server/Small Business Server), or you do it the gearhead way(any one of dozens of permutations of NFS or SMB, or webDAV, or a revision control mechanism, plus a helping of Linux Fu), or you basically just let the two drift apart, occasionally using a flash drive or emailing something to yourself. Pitiful.
Not everybody wants to be connected all the time; but I'm not sure I can think of anybody who wouldn't like having their data and files and bookmarks and whatnot there when they want them, wherever "there" happens to be(within the limits of privacy and security, of course, for the few people who think about that stuff).
There -are- no drawbacks that I know of. The iTunes App/Music stores both work fine on jailbroken iPhones. Way to spread FUD.
Yeah I didn't word that well.. I meant: I have this network all through my house, why should I use a server 1000 miles away to sync something with my basement.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
less likely to be wrong.
ROFL, having good karma is all about saying what other Slashdotters will agree with, and absolutely nothing to do with being right.
I have Excellent karma, so I should know... :P
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Google is "free" so to speak, but not exactly. I recently got a Google MyTouch and while entering all my contact information, I got to thinking what google has with this -- it has the ability to cross reference and correlate the contacts of millions of people, even with mug shots of them. And there is nothing you can really do about it if someone you know puts you in their contact list. A person can try to protect their own privacy online, but that person has no control over what their acquaintances do with that person's personal information.
So Cannonical probably wants a piece of that action. It'll have access to the interconnections between a lot of people skewed toward those in a certain technological niche. Anyway, nothing is free and sometimes you can't even stop others from costing you privacy.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
His question is, why can't he configure the app to sync directly with the Ubuntu machine in his own house, rather than passing the data through a remote intermediary? It's a good question.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS