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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.
So what he has to say must be important. (But I still don't care about Ubuntu phones)
Not wanting to sound like an arse but Windows Phone 8 already has a lot of the personal features he's talking about. You can pin music (artists, albums, playlists etc) to the home screen.
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?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Windows users don't care about Windows phones and aside from a few hobbiests, no one will care about Ubuntu phone.
Right behing Windows Phone, Blackberry, and Symbian.
Give them a year or two, and enough advertising budget, and maybe they can hit 0.1% overall market share.
Maybe it'll be an all-out game changer, but so far it's taken companies with billions of dollars in the bank to pull that off in the mobile space.
If nokia couldn't make meego fly, i don't think canonical will succeed with a linux system either. As almost every market tend to be 2-3 heavyweights and not much more.
...about as much as I want a Windoze phone. Not at all.
opps. somewhat carelessly posted as AC. is there any way to delete?!
This UID is 7651 digits too high to subjectively infer IQ from.
Apple's patent only applies to magical phones that have rounded corners. And only magical rounded corners that were filed down by genuine unicorn horns.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Just like how it tore up the PC industry.
Think about it...
just a little more...
now you get it.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I'm surprised everyone is very negative about this. Am I the only one who wants this? I suppose if you are an MS or Apple zealot, you already have what you want but I run Linux as my full time desktop and use it for all of my cloud servers. I LOVE linux. I have several Android devices and love them too but I do find them limiting. I wouldn't use Android as my desktop OS and I don't think things sync perfectly across devices (except for google services). So, why not have the same OS on my phone as my desktop? Oh, sure, you'll probably say get a Mac or Windows if I want that. But let me ask you this? Who do you trust more? Apple or Microsoft or Google? Now throw Ubuntu into the mix and maybe you think about it different. I know I do. I want, to whatever extent possible, a community open source OS on all my devices with "the cloud" as the glue. From the mainstream devices, Google is currently closest to meeting my needs, Apple second, nobody's in 3rd for me. I really really want this. Any fellow nerds coming with me?!
Isn't iOS and Mac OS X *nix based?
-- Linux user #369862
The only reason why I clicked on this story is because the guy's last name is Bacon.
Jono has drank so much Canonical koolaid, that he's been written off in my book. Read some of his blog posts -- he's become almost as egotistical as Shuttleworth at times.
Great video Ubuntu, but while saying the new OS will support all existing android based phones among others, you didn't really go into any detail. Most android companies throw together a set of patchs to get the android environment working with their specific hardware, so we wind up with a ton of slightly different android patched kernels not very compatible with eachother. In supporting a range of hardware how do you plan on dealing with this issue? Will there be seperate repos for each phone or will there be a generic ARM repo ?
http://interserver.net/
Advertisements for a cool new smartphone OS do not revolve around cloud, tweets, facebook, and slews of neatly bundled commercial services and integrated local/web search.
A real OS would provide a packaging option that included coming installed with nothing not even a phone dialer or SMS app. It should just focus on providing facilities to allow secure, effective communication and integration between apps and the users workflow. It should NOT define what that will be apriori.
The reason we don't have any good smartphone OS's is because too much value would be left on the table if one were to be designed where the user comes first and the value chain comes second. Ubuntu is being corrupted by its own success.
Better late than never. The good thing about an ubuntu phone OS is that it won't die. Once the community has it then we'll all be able to keep it rolling.
As someone who suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved his silky smooth 3GS, but left the walled garden for a Galaxy S2, I am thrilled about this. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water, yet I still find the experience more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back.
Also, I really like the idea of a gesture based UI. So far the reviewers have loved the Blackberry gesture based UI.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/review-blackberry-10-is-better-much-better-late-than-never/
If there is a build for the S2, I will definitely flash it. The chance to have the open platform of Linux/Android with the native speed of IOS is worth at least trying out.
It's 2013 and we're on Slashdot. I have to fire up a malware-bait browser because the article submission doesn't embed HTML video? :(
[/Angry nerd rant]
He had me at bacon.
At least he doesn't have a middle name that sounds similar to "want" or "like"
It will be interesting to see another platform in the mobile market but we'll see if it will fly or not.
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!
Handset manufacturers can easily add their own repositories just like many of the netbook manufacturers have been doing for years. If they want to upstream their drivers, all the better.
So in other words, the ubuntu phone supports nothing. Its up to manufacturers who already dont update their phones to take on the responsibility of writing compatible kernel patchs for another phone os they wont make any money off of?
http://interserver.net/
Yes, and neither does Android. Ubuntu Phone is not being made for the manufacturers, it is being made for the users and promoted to the manufacturers. In fact, right now they have Ubuntu Phone running on the Android kernel, so it is already 100% compatible with most Android phones.
Unless open drivers or specs are provided for the chipsets, the manufacturers are going to be on the hook for driver updates (which are required for kernel updates) no matter WHICH operating system they use.