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.

Comments

But WHY?

[DickBreath]

Sure, geeks like us will like it.

What benefit is it to mobile network operators to offer Ubuntu phones over, say, Android phones?

What benefit is there for an end user to buy it instead of, say, an Android phone?

What benefit is there for an OEM (eg, Samsung, HTC, etc) to manufacture an Ubuntu phone?

It's like the game Blackberry and Microsoft are playing trying to get into a market with entrenched players. (Apple and Android) If there are apps and cool phones, users will buy. Developers will write apps if there are users. OEMs will build devices if users are going to buy. How do you get the ball rolling?

If you have billions of dollars, you can try to buy your way into the market. Microsoft tried that with the Kin phone and failed. (Remember that one?) In the end, they didn't sell that many, so the loss per phone was only about $125,000 or somesuch. Microsoft is trying again, but things are not looking good.

So given all that, WHY will Ubuntu phone be successful? For what business reason? What is the business case to OEMs, to mobile operators, to end users? What benefit does (or will) it have over existing ecosystems (iPhone, Android, etc)? Even if you can name one, is it a benefit the entrenched players cannot quickly replicate?

Re:But WHY?

[Kethinov]

What benefit is there for an end user to buy it instead of, say, an Android phone?

The key value proposition to users is making your smartphone your primary (perhaps even only) computer by enabling you to to plug a monitor, keyboard, and mouse into it. And if they're really smart, they'll make a kick ass laptop dock for it so it can become a laptop too.

If they do that, then I'll be able to replace my wife's Android phone and her aging MacBook Air at the same time with the same device. She's not interested in faster hardware, but she'd definitely like not having to worry about sync'ing data between her phone and her laptop anymore.

If her phone and her laptop are physically the same device, then she can literally take her work with her at will in an effortless fashion without having to sync it with some clumsy cloud service first.