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Canonical Announcing Ubuntu Tablet Tomorrow?

Posted by samzenpus on from the tomorrow's-tech dept.

hypnosec writes "Canonical has a countdown on its site that indicates a possible tablet announcement tomorrow. With the Ubuntu Touch developer preview launching this week, the announcement about a tablet or at least an operating system for a tablet from Canonical has, it seems, taken a backseat. From the countdown that reads "Tick, tock, tablet time!" it is evident that Canonical is going to make some announcement about tablets tomorrow."

7 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Dead last by tftp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hope they will come up with some reason for the consumer to go out and buy an Ubuntu tablet. As things are, the competition is pretty strong. Android and iOS have all bases covered, with hundreds of thousands of applications, and with several years on the market, and with millions of deployed devices, and with the user base trained.

    Sight unseen, I'd say that an Ubuntu tablet may not even win against a Windows 8 tablet. It still may be that Ubuntu people have some bright idea that hasn't occurred to Apple and Google, but that is not very likely. Price-wise, they are competing with a free OS (Android) that Google spends millions on in R&D, and with finished tablets that can be had for under $100.

    1. Re:Dead last by rasmusbr · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That's true if we think of the market in terms of dollars, everyone who's prepared to pay $499 for a tablet already owns one. If we look at the market in terms of number of users and potential users I think we'll find that more than 95% of everyone in the world does not yet own a tablet. Even if we limit ourselves to the 2.5 billion or so people who have a high enough income that they could potentially invest in a cheap tablet I bet more than 2 billion of them don't yet own one. All those people have yet to be trained to use iOS or Android on a tablet, and most of them probably don't even own a smartphone yet.

      Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world, which sounds like a viable plan to me if they can execute it. My doubts revolve around Canonical's ability to deliver a decent version of their OS (both from a consumer perspective and from an app developer perspective) in a timely manner, before the market has been completely saturated by cheap Android tablets and perhaps a cheap version of the iPad. I think it's more likely that it will take them several years to get to where the OS is competitive with Android and by then it will surely be too late.

    2. Re:Dead last by Nerdfest · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think there's a market for a 'real' Linux OS on a mobile device. The N800 sold like crazy for how available it was, and people still covet them. It's not a huge market, but I think it's there.

  2. Re:Ubuntu Unity worst phone/tablet OS alpha test e by Desler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And yet when people used it on the Nexus 7 it was horrendous as a touch interface.

  3. Re:Will they just go away? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mint has a pretty decent income, they bring in thousands every month and publish their incomes and amounts on their website. Mint is financially supported and probably wouldn't exist if it were not a commercial distribution.

  4. Re:Will they just go away? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I used to appreciate Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu), but I really just wish another powerhouse distro would come along and take the banner for awhile. Preferably still based on Debian, but not necessary.

    So how about something like, uhhhh, Debian?

  5. Re:Unity? by BlackPignouf · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I totally agree, and I loved my customized KDE 3.5.
    But right now, with a job and a kid, I'm just not going to invest countless hours (days?) trying to make sense of every menu entry in KDE 4.x.