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Ubuntu Edge Smartphone Funding Trends Low
alphadogg writes "The first heady rush of support for Canonical's crowd-funded Ubuntu Edge smartphone appears to have tapered off, as donations for the eye-catching device have slowed substantially over the past several days. The project sits just above the $7 million mark at the time of this writing – a large sum by the standards of crowd-funded projects, to be sure, but the $32 million goal is still a long way off. The Edge is slightly, but measurably, behind schedule – by about $600,000, according to a tracking graph made by Canonical's Gustavo Niemeyer. However, there's speculation that wealthy Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth might contribute some of his personal fortune to the project." The campaign has already broken records with its spectacular first few days. I hope that Shuttleworth does kick in to make production feasible, because the idea and the design are impressive — but I'm leery of spending quite so much on any phone.
Shuttle worth has already said that he will not buy up unsold units, as that defeats the idea of crowd sourcing. Some of his ideas will make it into mainstream phones in a few years. BTW I bought 2.
While this looks to be a great phone, the crowdfunding campaign is about a lot more than getting a cool phone; it's about proving an idea: that there is a market for special-run, innovative devices. If they succeed, they could seriously change the way phones are produced, and we could see an influx of really cool hardware projects in the future. This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the opin hardware movement. While using open hardware is not a goal of this project, if they manage to succeed, we could see something similar for fully open smartphones not too far down the road. Shuttleworth said in his Reddit AMA that this might be an idea for the next iteration (though I wouldn't put too much stock in that). However, if the concept is proven, others could follow suit pretty quick. So, it's not so much $800 for a cool phone, but an $800 investment in the future of computing.
The design is interesting and I'd love a dual-boot android/ubuntu device but I can't spend $600, let alone $830 on a phone.
-SaNo
The trend of omitting an SD Card slot so that people are funneled through cloud services is disappointing. I personally won't be buying any device where I am forced into being Cloud-walled.
Strictly looking at the ratio of raised : goal doesn't tell the whole story for each of the past 3-days they've only earned 200k. If that trend continues (and imo it's more likely they will tail off further) they'll be ~12 million by the end of the campaign.