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CES: Jono Bacon Talks Up Ubuntu for Phones (Video)
One of the more interesting conversations Tim Lord had at CES this year was with Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, who was showing off the Ubuntu Phone that is supposed to be released later this year. According to the Ubuntu website, it "delivers a magical phone that is faster to run, faster to use and fits perfectly into the Ubuntu family." Big words, but if Ubuntu parent Canonical can live up to them, the mobile phone market may soon have an interesting new operating system competitor to shake things up.
Nokia pulled the plug on meego before the product even hit the market. The N9 was not released in any WP7 capable market. It was guarenteed to tank on business reasons due to the MS agreement, not due to lack of Nokia trying to make a new platform but failing.
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I'm surprised that the biggest deal about Ubuntu phone isn't mentioned!
You'll be able to plug this phone into a dock (or otherwise connect it to a big monitor, keyboard and mouse) and use it essentially like Ubuntu desktop. There, you'll be able to run all your usual desktop applications as well as your phone applications, on a big screen with full resolution. (The do need to be built for ARM, but already most of the software in the Ubuntu Software Center has ARM versions.)
Nobody does this yet. There are dockable Android phones, but Android is not a desktop OS, and the experience on a desktop is quite miserable, both in terms of UX (mouse support is awkward) and in terms of available applications.
Phones are powerful computers! It's silly that we carry all that power around with us and yet can't apply it towards the usual desktop experience. I see the Ubuntu phone as finally being able to bridge this gap.
Even more: I can imagine desktop applications that make use phone features. GPS is not something we usually have in laptops, but phones have it, and there can be cool desktop apps that make use of it. And there's tilt-control: I can imagine big desktop games making use of tilt: the phone will become something like a game "controller" (even though the entire computer is inside, too). And, of course, you have cellular internet built in. In a way, phones, as hardware, offer more features than desktops, and app developers will surely take advantage of it!
I'm very excited about this feature, and hope to see it fronted more as one of the big advantages of Ubuntu phone!