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Who Would Actually Build an Ubuntu Smartphone?
Nerval's Lobster writes "When Canonical whipped back the curtain from its upcoming Ubuntu for smartphones, it set off a flurry of blogosphere speculation about the open-source operating system's chances on the open market. But which company would actually build such a device? Apple and Research In Motion and Nokia are all out of the running, for very obvious reasons. Motorola, as a subsidiary of Google, is also unlikely to leap on the Ubuntu bandwagon. While Hewlett-Packard has flirted with smartphones in the past, most notably after its Palm acquisition, the company doesn't seem too focused on that segment at the moment. That leaves manufacturers such as HTC, which currently offer devices running either Google Android or Windows Phone. But given Android's popularity, it might prove difficult for Canonical to convince these manufacturers to do more than release a token Ubuntu device—especially if Google and Microsoft apply counter-pressure."
Give me a ubuntu rom that works and I'll install it myself.
Who would buy the ubuntu phone? How many units?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
there was a german startup that wanted to let you build your own smart phone, although the idea never fully materialized. this combined with an open source phone os could find itself a space on the smartphone shelf. the idea of being able to fully customize the phone could have a place in the enterprise.
I'm still waiting for a simple, pain-free, way to turn my old phones (not just Android ones) into simple general purpose computers by wiping the existing ROM. Cyanogenmod isn't available for my clunker.
Isn't that sad? A state-of-the-art piece of technology is only a clunker because its handicapped.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Install Android, and install Ubuntu's user space in a chroot. Connecting the machine to HDMI would display a prompt to start the X11 session, just as connecting an Android 2.x device to a PC used to display a prompt to mount the internal storage.
I would like to do actual development on a smart phone, and why not? It has more hundreds of times the computing power of mainframe I, as a student, shared with the entire university!
I want an app that lets me use any computer and keyboard to connect to my phone, and use it as a gateway to the cloud, to hold my personal work, etc.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=oem+smartphone+manufacturers
Who wants Ubuntu full-stop? They've ruined a perfectly good PC distro, and now they're about to release a useless cellphone OS nobody wants.
Canonical seems dedicated on making themselves undesirable.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I am honestly curious: Why would anyone want Ubuntu on a phone? Unless it gets a large user base there will be no software or support for it. What is it going to do better than iOS and Android to make tens of millions of people want it? It's not going to be easier to use than iOS. It's not going to be cheaper than Android.
Does a netbook, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and Google voice count. It saves airtime when travelling + free unlimited texting. A larger screen and keyboard are helpful for the baby boomers nearing retirement. When away from WiFi, it rolls over to a cell so no calls are lost.
The truth shall set you free!
that is - not at all
I have little doubt that they are interested in getting a phone maker to make a phone for them. If I were to guess, they will first target the Google Nexus devices.
from Amazon. Like...hello..?
Phones will probably stop sucking at almost exactly the same time that you can go buy a "white box" phone which doesn't have any OS preloaded at all.
Or better yet, when Coolermaster and Silverstone make phone enclosures, Asus and Gigabyte sell phone boards, etc..
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Samsung makes a phone for probably every OS there is.
We already have too many OS contenders in the market already. Canonical should instead made applications if they're hot to trot in order to jump into the hot cell phone markets. That said, the expenential bell curve on smart phones is soon to start rounding off once the majority of dumb phone users are forced into the upgrade due to availability. Once we're there, people will be looking for the next best hot exponential bell curve market (currently tablets) ad infinitum... The only areas unaffected by smart phones will be in the ultra-poor places where even a few bucks can be a financial burden.
FOCUS on what you're good at, which is apparently linux desktops awesome. Jump on the latest buzz words with half baked notions of being the next greatest Android/IOS and you'll most likely end up sharing shelf-space with WebOS, Maemo, and all the other failed to adopt platforms left in the wreckage.
Bye!
They tried Tizen in a Galaxy S3, and were planning to release a Tizen phone. Launching an ubuntu one, or at least, having it available for dual boot or optional OS, would not be so bad. In general, take out Apple, RIM, MS (if they make a phone like they did a tablet) and maybe Nokia, and all the other makers could try models with it instead of android, bada, sailfish, tizen, webos, firefox os or symbian, if is good enough. All those alternative OSs have their own good points, but having available an alternative OS if you want to give some special use to your phone (i.e. as enterprise phone more fitting than blackberry if good enough apps coming to the ubuntu version) gives extra value to your hardware.
I think that Asian companies are not out of the game. They almost always use some kind of open solution for their devices, since nobody wants proprietary OS no apps for that. For now, they use Android, but they can try Ubuntu in the future too.
The OP asks a good question, but to me, my concern is who would the carrier be? I suppose to at least a partial extent, that would be dictated by whether it's CDMA or GSM. That seems to be where the real cost is. I hate paying $90-100/month for voice and data.
Does a cellphone even work from inside the TARDIS ?
The Chinese will load any free OS onto a cheap POS phone and ship it. And sell millions. That's why Andriod has such amazing numbers, not because of US/Europe, but because of China.
Nobody will make an Ubuntu phone. Ubuntu have said they will use an Android kernel and associated blobs so the manufacturer will just be making an Android phone that doesn't completely lock down it's bootloader.
Why couldn't RIM do this? It would be another revenue stream and they could add BBM to it adding even more money :)
K Man
No
Who Would Actually Use a Ubuntu Smartphone?
It would allow me to access the full capabilities of my handheld, instead of the crippled giveaway shite they now have.
Their walled garden and practice of disabling Features and then charging monthly fees to enable them would end.
The only way that would ever happen is if the whole industry shifted to an open model and they lost market share.
Until someone comes along the an open plan and a competitive network, to get the ball rolling.
I would gladly pay retail for my own handset and escape the crippled device and exorbitant fees.
And Google's ever present butt sniffing.
Rick B.
If you've read /. recently, Linux users themselves will build their own Ubuntu phone with a raspberry pi.
...2013 will be the year of Ubuntu Phone??
Taking bets on how soon someone posts a kickstarter project scam that promises nothing more then pairing a free OS to some POS handset and how many thousands of fools will pay $100 for a free T-Shirt and empty promises.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
My answer to this one is the same as my response to the "who would buy RIM" question. There are lots of companies out there that currently manufacture PCs, laptops or commodity tablets but who don't manufacture phones (or not in any great quantity). I can see them as being the main target.
Lenovo is one possibility. Acer ans Asus are others. Dell has tried and failed at phones before, and could be game for another attempt (and they have a history of selling Ubuntu devices). And the dozens of others, big and small.
And that's before we get started on the phone manufacturers who have either not achieved success with Android, or not attempted a smartphone at all yet. Panasonic come to mind, as do Huawei and Alcatel.
Amazon is a possibility if they don't want to have all of their eggs in the Android basket. They've proven they can manage manufacturing, and no one does distribution better.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
Verizon, et al (with the possible exception of Sprint) have a large enough market share that the small percentage of hackers (classical definition) won't make a dent in their bottom line. This is assisted by the high cost to enter the market. Unfortunately, unless there is some sort of apocalypse or some other technical catastrophic, this will require legislative solution.
It's kind of ironic that the iPhone was successful for AT&T. Apple was the first company (at least I'm aware of) that told the carriers, "No, we're going to make the phone. You have no say. You will buy it as-is or we go to someone else." Verizon said no because they wanted to lock down the phone. AT&T, knowing the number of acolytes willing to switch over to get an Apple device, said, "Sure!" Granted, this changed down the road, with AT&T getting more and more features. But, for the first time, a cell phone manufacturer dictated to a carrier the terms of how a phone would work.
Unlike Apple, Canonical doesn't have the name brand. And their fans are too small in number to take this much of a risk. I imagine that people who will use the Ubuntu interface will be people like you and me, who load the ROM directly on the phone.
I just hope that the source will be released so we can all benefit.
We don't live in Shouldland.
Samsung is already producing phones based on Tizen afterall.
Must say I'm inclined to agree with the article, for the very simple reason that I don't think the OS on a phone is a very good selling point.
The selling point is what you can do with the phone. How it somehow makes life easier/better/more fun for you. Exactly what about Ubuntu (Phone Edition) is going to give it the edge over Android, iOS or even Blackberry OS 10?
I would buy one because I'm bored with iOS (iphone 5 was a big meh over iphone 4), I already have an windows phone and it's more locked up than iOS, android is just a choppy as it always has been and sailfish isn't here yet. It's boring and I want something exciting.
I have an (old) Nokia N900, which runs the factory standard Linux OS, basically a standard Debian Linux, very similar to Ubuntu. One of the very rare Linux-based phones that is not locked down at all.
(I run GCC on the phone, so rare things that are not available via apt-get can be compiling for ARM easily.)
Moving on . . .
I wouldn't build an Ubuntu anything. Too much Unity.
I look forward to CES 2014 when there's 200 devices demoing Ubuntu and Firefox OS.
Wake me up when I can just install any distro with an ARM port from a flash drive. I'm not buying a device they've intentionally locked me out of.
We already have not less than four Linux ports to phones/tablets, with Android getting 99.9% of the market.
The rest is somehow shared between WebOS, MeeGo and Boot2Gecko!
The chances that Ubuntu really makes its way to the mobile phone market is the same as the ones for you to get the Higgs Boson in your microwave owen.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Foxconn
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
There are lot of companies in places like China and Taiwan that are able to manufacture mobile devices. Because of Android's liberal licensing, a lot of these companies have churned out Android devices under brand names that you've never heard of. If Ubuntu software is equally or more liberally licensed, they will be more than happy to slap this free software on their devices and flood the market with them cheaply.
Don't panic. This is just an idea that passed in my head.
Still, I would love this to happen...
Google is not in a position to pressure Android phone/tablet manufacturers. Samsung, LG and HTC will all be open to other operating systems, given that Google is now a competitor of theirs as well as their free OS provider. Another free OS provider which does not compete with them will naturally look very tempting for business reasons. The real threat is whether Ubuntu can survive in the current patent war. Samsung, LG and HTC have all fought in this war in favor of using Android. And I believe they would be happy to ally themselves with Ubuntu also, given the proper business incentives.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Just like we used to with desktops. Then take them to our favorite carrier. I want a data only plan so I can do all my calls over VOIP. DIY mobile please.
has reasonable functionality with the hardware, I buy on the apps, both pre-installed and available. The geek market is so niche that mom and pa and grandma aren't going to add to the sales volume. Why would I buy a $160 phone when for $199 I can get a pre-loaded phone with what seems like 100 apps and they are all tested and just run? 99% of the buyers aren't going to mod the thing, they just want something that works and which has a carrier behind it to reassure them that it will be something they can use to get work done with or play on.
Can you see an app developer testing on a device that can get a patch a week or can be mod'ed by the local geek? Trying to support that variability could be a nightmare.
While Hewlett-Packard has flirted with smartphones in the past, most notably after its Palm acquisition, the company doesn't seem too focused on that segment at the moment.
HP has a focus?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
WSilly me, i thought that all android phones were an offshoot of umbuntu. With a java flavor. If i remember right, being in my late 60's, that when you get su priveledges, its just like programing in umbuntu. Well thats another language out. Damn, that was a reason to go to school in texas this spring. Now I cannot sit on campus and the quad and daydream of olden days. Damn, disapointing.
The whole smartphone situation is fucked. The iPhone sitting in front of me is a computer that runs Unix.
I am a software engineer. Computers running Unix/Linux are the most powerful tool that I can utilize. I've had something that fits that description sitting in my pocket for years now.
Yet I cannot run my own software on it without paying the Steve Jobs tax, nor can I use it as the useful tool that it could be. Yeah, yeah, Apple is not trying to sell products to me, they're selling to the average consumer who wants something that "just works", yeah, yeah, I could jailbreak it and get more or less what I want, yeah, I know, shut up.
The fact remains: it's bullshit that I cannot put music on it with ssh, or write my own scripts that are fired off in the background when certain events happen, or write my own apps, etc. without jumping thru a bunch of arcane hoops.
Same can be said for other platforms.
All these smartphones are computers, goddamnit. Can't I just install my own OS? Fuck!!
They will just distribute a ROM. As always Linux enthusiasts will wipe the manufacturers OS
Agreed, since Tizen, Ubuntu, Android, Chromium OS, Firefox OS, Mer, webOS etc are all Linux based...
The Cortex A-15 has hardware virtualization. Pair this with KVM and you run multiple OSes simultaneously.
Run your android dev environment on your Ubuntu host (connected to keyboard/mouse/screen) and deploy on the same hardware to your Android instance. Read a PDF using Okular (Plasma Active) while checking your email within your workplace-supplied Chromium OS instance.
The power of multiple OSes on the same handset is to appease corporate IT with respect to bring-your-own-device. Buy the dual-sim model and they can potentially be completely separate.
If Shuttleworth wants to make a REAL difference in the future of mobile Linux, he needs to come up with a way to allow loadable kernel modules built for older kernels to keep working with newer ones. God knows, Google's never going to do it. It's an old, tired story by now in Android-land... every new version of Android needs a new kernel, every new kernel catastrophically breaks every loadable kernel module that came before it, and most manufacturers are in no hurry whatsoever to release newer kernel modules for existing phones... assuming they ever do. It's a problem that bites Android over and over again, year after painful year, and it's going to hurt Ubuntu even WORSE because it will initially be forced to live with Android's crumbs and hardware cast-offs.
For God's fsck'ing sake, a couple of years ago, people were using NDISwrapper to run binary wifi drivers intended for WINDOWS NT under Linux. Is it REALLY that impossible to allow end users to wrap binary kernel modules for things like the camera, GPS, 4G modem, or whatever in some kind of thin thunking layer so they can at least limp along when the next kernel comes out, even if the manufacturer is an asshole and takes months (or eternity) to release newer drivers? If we can thunk binaries built for A TOTALLY DIFFERENT OPERATING SYSTEM into working, is it REALLY that hard to pull a similar trick with binaries that were built for Linux in the first place?
I think this is a good time to point out that Firefox OS will be free and open and, once released, you should be able to install it on your Android phone without issue. (It's also running on the same basics as Android.)
I'm not claiming it will be the end-all-be-all of mobile OSes, but because of Mozilla's lack of profit-drivenness, it will have no lock-down. Heck, you can go download the entirety of the code right now.
Canonical is tiny and hardly has any money... ... OTOH given Nokias recent success rate it'll be available at the cost of a cup of coffee soon enough.
But MS will finish it's acquisition process before that.
Of course this was a joke.
Still, Canonical could grow into a successful company if some of there flagship projects gain large acceptance.
There is large speculation about Microsoft buying Nokia since almost two years now. Nokia was an empty bag already with Elop (no more own ecosystem, no more custom ASICs, no more factories, and collapsing sales channels) now there even have sell the bag (the Espoo HQ) ...
you get a phone running windoze and dual boot it
They could go the apple route and start selling the uPhone.
Maybe it could make enough money that they would remove the spyware from their shitty distro.
Doesn't matter, they have failed to release even 1 quality distro. That is an impressive record of fail.