Jono Bacon Talks About Ubuntu Phone Progress (Video)
Timothy Lord caught up with Ubuntu's Jono Bacon at OSCON and got a nice update on the state of the Ubuntu Phone, which Canonical first announced in January, 2013. Tim interviewed Jono about it on camera at CES in February. Look at the "Related Stories" attached to this intro and you'll see a bunch more Ubuntu phone stories. DISCLOSURE: At least two Slashdot editors currently run Ubuntu or Kubuntu, so we have at least a mild pro-Ubuntu bias. Bias or no, It's interesting to watch the Ubuntu phone development process, even as those who are satisfied with Android phone or iPhones, ask, "Why?" We could ask the same about the Firefox OS Phone, too. Maybe the most realistic answer in both cases is, "Because we could." But who knows? These new phone operating systems might turn out to be more useful than Android or iOS. We'll see.
Get hourly updates featuring
-Vague laws misinterpreted by engineers to be threats to privacy/civil liberties
-The latest release of every obscure Linux distro and its shortcomings compared to 10 other distros
-Factually spurious articles about the death of the IT industry
-Philosophical flame wars about the validity of alternative energy/electric cars
-Mental masturbation regarding drones/macs/climate change
-Hypothetical discussions of Rasberry Pi created by Arduino driven 3-D printers purchased with BitCoins
-Windows 8 trolling
Available Apps Include
-Car Analogy Generator
-Library of Congress Unit Conversion
-XKCD Reference Linker
-Shill Detector
-Basement Leak Sensor
-Voice Wreck Ignition Citation Search Engine
Fully compatible with
¦Android
¦BlackBerry 10
¦iOS
¦Nokia Asha
¦Sailfish OS
¦Windows Phone
¦Windows RT
¦Bada
¦BlackBerry OS
¦Grid OS
¦Linux
¦Mer
¦S40
¦Brew
¦SHR
¦Symbian
¦webOS
¦Tizen
*Unicode support included in a future update
And a WebM/MP4/Downloadable material too, please...
DISCLOSURE: At least two Slashdot editors currently run Ubuntu or Kubuntu,
How shocking! You guys are total rebels!
i really dont feel i need to elaborate on this anymore.
Nothing about it is groundbreaking. Everything about it is either evolutionary spec bumps and cobbling together features from prior phones. Docking a phone and having it change GUIs or change to a desktop OS is not a Canonical innovation despite all their back patting.
...and Openmoko phones (and recently OpenPhoenux), which can run OpenEmbedded, Debian, Slackware, OpenWrt, Android and many many more. Some of those distros are even usable as a phone. Heck, you can even use Emacs as phone interface!
That headline has to be one of the starkest attempts on Slashdot to bait potential readers for a story that I've seen for a very long time. Look at that headline! Linux and Bacon!! Why it's enough to .... mmmm ... bacon. Excuse me....
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Isn't the ad the only important part to Dice?
It seems to me like the real purpose of a device like the edge is to replace your desktop hardware. Is that really possible yet?
Somebody should have listed that there was a minute long advertisement before you even get to SEE the interview. Closed it, sorry. Not wasting time on that.
Heck, you can even use Emacs as phone interface!
But what my phone really needs is a good text editor.
*ducks*
the MOST IMPORTANT PART is not what they are working on.
It needs to be a phone and phone calls need to be the absolute most reliable part of the phone. The last tow attempts at this Open Source phone crap has yielded phones that barely work as phones.
I dont want a pocket tablet/PDA running linux, I can get one of those, I want a PHONE that the phone part works perfectly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think there was Gentoo for Openmoko Neo Freerunner at some point. Never tried it though.
At least two Slashdot editors currently run Windows/OSX/DOS/OS2Warp/Dipswitches.
The difference is, a Debian phone would probably be able to save camera images in every meaningful format to have existed since 1980 *EXCEPT* Jpeg unless you rebuilt the whole thing from scratch for some *unfathomably* stupid & pedantic reason (install ImageMagick under Debian sometime, then go through hours or days of pain getting Jpeg support to work, and you'll know what I'm talking about).
...near-POSIX compliance, & real package management instead of this appstore bullshit?
With ~30% of the month over, they've raised less than a quarter of what they need. I don't see how this will succeed in getting funding, but I hope it works out. Although something about the way they talk about the goal tells me that it's not a serious roadblock if they don't make the $32M. Just a hunch though. Also I didn't realize until I watched the video that you can bring your own phone if you want, so probably lots more people will benefit from the software work they're doing than will benefit from the hardware work. And regarding the hardware, Jono did say, "it's got this...this angle at the top," which was the funniest comment on the hardware design I've heard so far ;-) (And come on, IBM--that commercial was torture. Liven it up a little.)
Most of the time probably. But ARM SoCs have an advantage over even an i3 that tries to brute force every operation. ARM SoCs have special chips to do certain tasks (ASICs). So I wouldn't be too surprised if a high-end smartphone can actually encode certain videos faster than an ATOM. I know, for one thing, that my dual-core off-brand China tablet can play h264 videos smoother than my ATOM-based "HTPC".
I suspect they're doing it for the buzz. I mean, if they're really serious about meeting their financing goal why choose a lesser known crowd funding site like Indie Gogo? I won't be surprised if some mysterious "donor" suddenly doubles the pledged amount at the last minute.
Slashdot has editors?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
No, I didn't. And after counting the letters, I realize that I still don't know that.
As a side note, it's been interesting to note how much Canonical wants to distance Ubuntu from being known as just-another-Linux-distro. Yes it's still Linux, yet it still runs Linux programs, but Ubuntu doesn't mention the word Linux at all in most of its literature unless it's of a technical nature (heck, the word Linux doesn't even appear on http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop except as a keyword in the page's source).
This Slashdot article isn't even in the Linux category here, which I find telling.
That's great. I was aware that I can plug my current phone into a TV. I didn't know that they had full pc desktop apps for it. I'm off to Google Play to go get them
you're probably a ubuntdroid being sarcastic, but yeah, full debian was there(android app market) almost two years ago or so..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.