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."

Comments

Oh No

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Oh No

[oodaloop]

At the time, I considered 2010 to be the year of the Linux phone, and had a signature that said such. From the beginning of the year to the end, there was a huge rise in numbers of available handsets running Android and proportion of users using Android compared to iOS and other OSs. 2010 also saw phones running Android 1.5-1.6 (which is terrible in retrospect) in the beginning to 2.3 (which is decent and still widely used) at the end. It was a rather impressive evolution in a single year. I'd love to see another popular Linux distro on the phone that could actually compete in the marketspace. Maybe this will be it. But we've already seen the year of the Linux phone.

Wat

[Quiet_Desperation]

I heard you have to use a terminal to dial the phone.

>call -n 8005551234 -calrid 0 | foneaudapp -spkr 1 -micr 1

Re:Wat

[girlintraining]

>call -n 8005551234 -calrid 0 | foneaudapp -spkr 1 -micr 1

Typical noob...

cat ~/mail/contacts/* | grep "[CONTACT_NAME]" | grep [0-9]???-[0-9]???-[0-9]???? | awk BEGIN { FS="," } { print $2 } | call -calrid 0 -n & ; foneaudapp -spkr /udev/audio/default/out -micr /udev/audio/default/in

Re:Wat

[realmolo]

Emacs can already make cell phone calls. It's been built-in since 1980.

Re:Wat

[Inf0phreak]

Typical noob...

cat ~/mail/contacts/* | grep [...]

You earned yourself a Useless Use of Cat Award!

Someone explain how this works?

[scorp1us]

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?

Re:If you're a fan of the Unity UI...

[oodaloop]

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.

Re:Useless - schmuseless!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Good lord what have I started?