Slashdot Mirror
Canonical Seeks $32 Million To Make Ubuntu Smartphone
nk497 writes "Canonical has kicked off a crowdfunding campaign to raise $32 million in 30 days to make its own smartphone, called Ubuntu Edge, that can also hook up to a monitor and be used as a PC. If it meets its funding target on Indiegogo, the Ubuntu Edge is scheduled to arrive in May 2014. To get one, backers must contribute $600 (£394) on the first day or $810 (£532) thereafter. Canonical will only make 40,000 of the devices."
Would rather have a http://pomegranatephone.com/
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Actual link to indiegogo page, which is missing from FTS
http://igg.me/at/ubuntuedge
I guess Shuttleworth is tired of spending his own money on developing tech nobody wants.
How can PCPro get page hits and ad impressions by linking to the IndieGoGo page?
As a corporate overlord to well-meaning young hippie-leaning techies, Canonical has always been a bit odd. I recall their early versions came bundled with video samples of Nelson Mandela. That sort of bald-faced symbolic sales pitch to the young and idealistic was cleverly successful even if it now seems a bit easier to criticize them for their recent decisions. If it's a walled garden they're building, I suppose it'll have lots of flowers in it.
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
I am writing this comment on a Dell that came with Ubuntu preinstalled.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
So you can have your computer in your pocket all the time! Think of it:
1. No more storing your data on crappy services like Dropbox or Google Drive. Now it's just in your pocket, everywhere!
2. Use the same apps on the phone as on the desktop! The only difference is the input and output!
3. Hook up your phone to any desktop that has a monitor, keyboard, and mouse (but for some reason no computer)!
For those who haven't caught on, this whole post was sarcasm.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It works great if the risk taker is poor or middle class and cash strapped, and I think that's what it is (or should be) intended for. Otherwise, I agree, it's ridiculous for a billionaire to use this method for funding, but that's why he's a billionaire (along with all the other billionaires). It's because he knows how to work the system and has few scruples.
Canonical has bullshitted too much in the past to be taken seriously about this. Several times, they've announced that new products from major vendors (Asus, Dell) would run their version of Linux. Never happened. They need to STFU until the product ships.
Who is voting up this dumbass?
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/w/wiki/3685.dell-xps-13-laptop-developer-edition-a-client-to-cloud-solution-project-sputnik.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009F1I16K/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B009F1I16K&linkCode=as2&tag=wwwcanoniccom-20#productDetails
I am writing this comment on a Dell that came with Ubuntu preinstalled.
What is this? A voice of reason and fact? I insist you take back your harsh statement and engage in fallacy and untruth!
I like how they have an $80,000 option, and then want an additional $100 for shipping. Really we just gave you 80k and you want extra to ship it??
I think the crowd funding is great for projects where the person would have no way to fund the project on their own, but these private for profit businesses doing this is ridiculous, they want no risk but all the profit and glory.
I know double fine did it(I even supported it) but at least you can see where they are going with not going with a publisher
The problem is that the 'enthusiasts' who would be contributing to this have just recently had several slaps to the face from Canonical in the form of window buttons, unity, unity & unity. And amazon shopping lenses. 'This is not a democracy' is still rings in the ears. Now Canonical realise that they need the enthusiasts, who's toes they stepped on, to help with this venture into the mobile space.
To be honest, I hope they succeed. I think the concept of a phone that doubles as a desktop could very well be the future of the desktop computer for many people. The hardware also looks very nice (which is a necessity to tempt anyone off android/ios) - I agree with Shuttleworth that mobile screen resolution is getting out of hand, and I'd much rather the colourful OLED displays than the ridiculously high res LCDs (which then look laggy because the graphics can't keep up - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmywUhu2Pus) and a sapphire glass screen sounds interesting (though will it be as strong as gorilla glass - I doubt it).
I wonder how many of us would have paid up if Nokia had done this with the N950?
You forgot the best feature:
4. When your phone is misplaced or stolen, your data automatically transitions from pocket data to somewhere data.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Yeah, how dare companies attempt to crowd source things! Damn, I just put up $200 to a Japanese animation studio so they could extend a sequel to a short they did, what madness is this!? Haven't people realized that rather than showing support for things they like and want, they should just shut up and take what's given to them?
Obviously, we're all supposed to just buy whatever Android, iOS, or Windows Phone is on the market. Choice? What nonsense!
Could you link to those announcements please?
There are lots of Canonical announcements about machines coming preloaded with Unbuntu. Not many shipments.
There are other tablet and phone Ubuntu announcements, which you can find with Google. Someone is taking "pre-orders" for a Ubuntu tablet for delivery in late 2013.
Despite all their press releases, Canonical seems unable to get any manufacturer to ship a preloaded Ubuntu machine in volume.
I don't really understand the crowdfunding craze.
Yeah, that's pretty clear.
The idea with capitalism...
...is orthogonal to crowdsourcing. Under capitalism, individuals own property. That's it. They're free to use that property (including money) to make more money if they so choose, or they can make their own deals to trade for something else. With crowdfunding, a bunch of people put their money into a pool that is then used to fulfill some purpose, such as tooling manufacturers and setting up supply lines to produce a phone.
This does not require a middleman, and in fact the exact same model is used to start practically every corporate partnership: Several individuals pool their resources to fulfill some goal... Perhaps one guy rents the storefront, another buys the supplies, and a third handles the paperwork, resulting in a 3-person partnership to run a store. The only difference is that now there are several middlemen (Kickstarter and IndieGoGo being two) who will take a small commission to connect thousands of investors with the managers. The model is still the same: One guy handles paperwork, one guy arranges for suppliers, and 40,000 other investors chip in cash.
The "trinket" they receive is the return on their investment. Perhaps it's a phone, or their name on a satellite, or even just the personal satisfaction of seeing something made. These are not new deals. Prior to crowdfunding, patrons would simply pay artists out of their own pocket to produce works, or gather together in groups (such as the Lions Club, or Rotary, or various church groups) to pay for something they couldn't afford on their own.
There is absolutely no requirement that an investment's goal be to make more money. An investment is merely a resource put towards any particular goal.
Yeah, ok, "risk capital to make bank" hasn't been capitalism since the first limited liability corporation was set up, but at least there was some semblance of risk.
That's exactly what the limited libility leaves at risk: what's been invested, and nothing more. The limit on liability means that the company is its own legal entity, and if it's the target of a lawsuit, the owners' separate personal resources aren't at risk. The invested capital is still at risk, but the investor isn't required to be 100% at risk. If an airplane manufacturer goes bankrupt, the owner isn't still contractually obligated to fulfill orders for planes.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Someone who wants to live in a world where the product they're proposing to build exists, I'd expect?
I don't know about anybody else, but I expect that society should be giving us all more for less as progress results in more reward for less input, and there's more to go around. The sad thing is, wages don't even need to keep up with productivity, or at least they don't have to advance as quickly, in order to represent satisfactory progress.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because every company needs investors, right? Why can't those investors just be the first customers looking to get in early? How is this a bad thing?
What the fuck does this matter? Isn't something like this a perfect gauge for early-adopter interest?
and I have both a Dell AND Asus with Ubuntu on them -- they work fine.
i noticed alienware has the choice of ubuntu -- alienware is owned by dell and is their 'gaming' model line http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-x51-r2/pd.aspx
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Posted without sarcasm:
1. Maybe there won't be the quid pro quo of all of your private information so you can use the "free" apps
2. Perhaps your carrier won't be able to dive into your phone and change any old setting they desire
3. With luck, maybe your apps won't have obscene data needs that can be sold on the open market for bigdamndata engines
4. And maybe we can have apps that just do something, rather then the crippled-til-you-pay model.
But Canonical hasn't guaranteed anything, and the carriers won't love them unless Canonical allows them to feed their shareholders, so it's unlikely as a result that carriers will want the devices to market in the first place.
Oh, wait.....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I have to admit, I'm not exactly jumping out of my seat to send $600+ to the company that's been fucking up Ubuntu pretty badly for the past couple of years.
I read the internet for the articles.
Major OEMs (HP, Dell, etc) ship millions of computers with Ubuntu every year. The shipments are mostly to emerging markets (China, India...), which is why you don't see many machines in western (read: slashdot-reading) countries.
Source: I am affiliated with that effort
They already hit the first million in just a few hours since the story hit the big media. Refreshing a few times, they seem to do about 200k$ per hour right now, so I guess they might easily sell the first 5000 phones at the reduced price. It was probably a good idea to trigger some people into a quick decision by lowering the price on the first day, so that they can realease a press release tomorrow saying they hit their first target. It will be hard to keep the same pace in the next 30 days, though ...
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
There is a lot wrong with android.
1. No good window managers, this means tiling and layering
2. Sudo not built in
3. Lack of normal linux desktop, including X. So I have to use VNC to get normal linux apps to display.
4. lack of decent package management. This means repositories and debs/rpms. This means being able to support dependencies.
One of the first things I did with my android smartphone was plug in a USB keyboard and mouse and wonder why they didn't "just work".
Re: sapphire: sapphire is one of the hardest materials there is, I think you could scratch the heck out of 'gorilla glass' with it. Just looked it up, gorilla glass has a "Vickers" hardness of 701 (max) vs. sapphire, at 2300.
That said, sapphire is more brittle and crack-prone, however. Apparently gorilla glass is treated to stop crack propagation. It's quite possible a hammer-blow that wouldn't damage gorilla glass would smash sapphire.
--PM
Is the hypothetical Ubuntu smartphone worth this much? I can buy a Nexus 4 for half this price and hook it up to an HDMI monitor and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
800. it's just a number they pulled out of their hat, really, since they have zero idea what hardware they will actually use and what it will cost. once they have the money(if they get it) they'll go shopping around china for a board + soc provider. even then the timeframe isn't realistic, especially if they promise to buy the fastest multicore arm chips available at that time(or the trick is in the "available", since that might mean higher end samsung/apple type of soc of _today_, since they wouldn't be able to source faster chips in time for may 2014, with the faster production lines churning the chips for sammy and apple, essentially it's not as simple as buying bags of x86 parts - if you'll settle for parts that are two generations old then you can source them far more easier).
there's another a bit similar in hw case going on with jolla. they were floating around comments a year ago that they would have had something for christmas last year since they were essentially buying the whole thing, board+soc. but uh, haven't seen one yet and they're projecting pre-orders to ship maybe for christmas 2013.. admittedly jolla went for not so high end hw and price tag at 400.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Did you miss that the $80000 option was for 100 units which actually is a lower price per unit, so why should you also get free shipping when you already get a better price?
There are plenty of us who want Linux Mint and easy to use Linux. The mere fact that Shuttleworth went off on a weird Unity loop and left it for others to commercialise the technology he originally developed doesn't mean we don't want or shouldn't recognise his vision and financial contribution. I think that going direct to the contribution page and booking a cool new Linux device doesn't sound like a major pain for a bunch of us.
If people keep buying the interesting new Linux directed devices then this will keep the hardware designers making them. That can never be bad.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
If you buy a modern smart phone without a contract in the US, $600 is a pretty normal price. That's for companies like Samsung, HTC, and Apple, which make millions of phones in a batch so they can negotiate a bulk discount from their suppliers.
Canonical is making 40,000 phones at most, so that's too few to get a bulk discount. I think $830 is a reasonable price. However, I don't have $830 handy, or $600. Or $60. I have debt and kids that need to visit an orthodontist. So I'm out.
I didn't get the memo either. Are we still allowed to hate Larry Ellison?
still more than Windows Phone 8 managed.... :)
Not to mention that with a device based on a more "standard" Linux, booting other "standard" Linux platforms should actually be a fairly painless step.
It will be brown. Nobody will want to buy a brown cellphone.
As a corporate overlord to well-meaning young hippie-leaning techies, Canonical has always been a bit odd. I recall their early versions came bundled with video samples of Nelson Mandela. That sort of bald-faced symbolic sales pitch to the young and idealistic was cleverly successful even if it now seems a bit easier to criticize them for their recent decisions. If it's a walled garden they're building, I suppose it'll have lots of flowers in it.
Is it still a walled garden when each line of code is easily accessible? Is it still a walled garden when I can shut off any of the shitty features Ubuntu has implemented (Amazon results, install alternate desktop using packages Canonical itself provides.) Can you say that about Google, Apple, MS?
People keep riffing Shuttleworth and Canonical as villains within the OS/Free Software world. They don't contribute back to upstream enough and shit. Leaving out the part about how the code is right there for people to take and use as they see fit. Which really, is something the OS/FS crowd constantly bullies new users over "The code is right there, DIY."
I think the haters are really just pissed off that Canonical has done a better job at selling Linux than they ever did.