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Hands On With Ubuntu For SmartPhones
adeelarshad82 writes "Ubuntu for smartphones may be pretty late to the smartphone ecosystem, but as the hands-on video demonstrates, Canonical has been paying attention. The operating system is just called Ubuntu, allowing the company to complete their illusion that this operating system offers everything that desktop Ubuntu runs. If you're a fan of the Unity UI you will find yourself right at home with this interface since every bit of Ubuntu has visual cues that come straight from Unity. As the video shows, the animations looked great, and the phone feels incredibly fast. The top bar of the OS has several icons across it, offering a quick glimpse into things like battery life, messages and others. Settings for every app are available by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, in a gesture that is quite similar to the one used in Windows 8 to access the menu. Given that it's early days for the OS, Ubuntu is far from perfect. For instance, their welcome screen allows for way too many apps to be rapidly accessible without a pin lock of some kind."
I wanted 2013 to be the year of the Linux desktop, not the Linux phone. Now I'm going to have to get this tattoo changed again.
I heard you have to use a terminal to dial the phone.
>call -n 8005551234 -calrid 0 | foneaudapp -spkr 1 -micr 1
Tablets and phones are where Unity should be, it seems like it would function best on those devices.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I'm on board with this Ubuntu-on-a-phone idea. But I want to know how it works. Is the phone itself one display (display 0) and when you plug in another display (conventional monitor) you get a traditional Ubuntu desktop on display 1? Two display managers on one system? How does the window manager work? Can I drag windows to my phone screen?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I don't think Unity has many fans when it comes to desktops and laptops. But tablets and netbooks? Yeah, I can see that. I don't like Canonical forcing a tablet OS on the desktop (and I like it even less when Microsoft does it). But moving a touch-based tablet OS onto a phone sort of makes sense. Perhaps we'll see the day when Ubuntu is nothing more than a tablet and phone OS and we'll all laugh when we think about the days we used it on the desktop.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I don't want a Shuttleworth phone, I want a linux capable phone. I want a phone so controllable that if the phone is capable of doing it then I or someone else is doing it. The ideal phone would be one so controllable that some hardcore dude would instantly cobble together a complete command line interface to the phone:
phone-dial 5551234
sms-message -u5551234 'I will be 5 minutes late'
list-recent-calls
I am sick of phones that are missing features that would tick off the telcos. I want to block text messages from certain users (I'm looking at you Telus) I want to have a list of people who can and can't call me at certain times of the day. I want to block calls from certain callers. I want an easy button to turn my cell data on and off. I want to delete any app that I don't want. When (not if) I reinstall the OS I want to strip out everything and then put back only that I want (I'm looking at you NewsStand). Whereas I see an Ubuntu phone as being Shuttleworth trying to get his piece of the appstore pie. I want a phone that cannot be locked to a carrier.
You're forgetting command line development and editing
time. If I need to do something like:
head -n 120 FILE | grep foo
and on first run it doesn't turn out what I was expecting, I
may well edit the previous command line changing it into:
cat FILE | grep foo
Plenty of seeming redundancy there too, but not when you
take the actual editing into acount as well.
I don't think Unity has many fans when it comes to desktops and laptops. But tablets and netbooks? Yeah, I can see that. I don't like Canonical forcing a tablet OS on the desktop (and I like it even less when Microsoft does it). But moving a touch-based tablet OS onto a phone sort of makes sense. Perhaps we'll see the day when Ubuntu is nothing more than a tablet and phone OS and we'll all laugh when we think about the days we used it on the desktop.
To be fair, they aren't forcing Unity on you. They're offering it as an option. I don't like it so currently I'm running Gnome 2 as my window manager, but I also have KDE4, Gnome 3, LXDE, OpenSTEP, wm2 and twm installed so I can choose whichever I feel like on the day.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.