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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.
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.
You make a good point. I would also add that an Android developer could make an app that puts widgets on the home screen, or bookmarks to urls that the app can recognize. Therefore, the mechanism exists to develop Android apps that can pin anything you want to the home screen.
So what does Ubuntu phone offer that is compelling. Especially compelling to OEMs (eg, HTC, Sony, Samsung) and compelling to mobile operators (AT&T, Verizon, etc)? And what is compelling to end users that the competition cannot easily replicate?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
While BB10 can use Android BB10 is also using QML, the same as this phone.
QML is overall better doe mobile development, while Qt people work on bringing QML to iOS and android. Soon one runtime will run on them all, including Ubuntu Phone
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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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So what does Ubuntu phone offer that is compelling. Especially compelling to OEMs (eg, HTC, Sony, Samsung) and compelling to mobile operators (AT&T, Verizon, etc)? And what is compelling to end users that the competition cannot easily replicate?
I rag on Unity just about any time there's a chance, but I'm actually excited about this.
IMO, after you get the radios working, the apps out there for phones are really really simple. My phone (an HTC EVO Shift 4g) is often sluggish, and the OS and mandatory apps take up a ton of the available space. Something like this has the potential to provide a very full featured and light weight OS/apps that are nice and snappy. This matters a LOT in the mobile area. The less power you need, the less batter you use up. You can't simply keep throwing more power into the phones to accommodate things, because it comes at a big cost.
What's the matter to OEMs? They'll (potentially) be able to produce a feature comparable device for less money, or tweak out more speed and free space and free ram from the same hardware.
This is similar to what Meego and Symbian had going for them. The Nokia / MS thing killed much of that momentum. It *could* be picked back up (there is at least one company trying to do so), but so could this. IMO, something like this is a very very good thing.
There are plenty of things i can NOT do with my android that I would (likely) be able to do with a phone that is more purely GNU. A bunch of that could be resolved by rooting my phone, but that still leaves things, and it's not as easy to port things to it.
I think there's plenty of room in the market for this (or something very similar). The poor reception of Windows 8 phones is not an indicator that this will fail. There are also many other price, performance, market, control, customization ability, etc differences. This would be a better comparison to Nokia's previous phones, but more advanced, and those were profitable.
But Nokia didn't even try to make Meego fly.
And it still was more successful than their Windows phones despite not having spent a single dollar on marketing.
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.
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.
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!