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A Month With a Ubuntu Phone
When the first Ubuntu phone came out, reviews were quick to criticize it for its lackluster hardware and unusual take on common mobile software interactions. It's been out for a while, now, and Alastair Stevenson has written about his experiences using it for an entire month. While he doesn't recommend it for phone users who aren't tech savvy, he does say that he began to like it better than Android after adjusting to how Ubuntu does things. From the article:
[T]he Ubuntu OS has a completely reworked user interface that replaces the traditional home screen with a new system of "scopes." The scope system does away with the traditional mobile interface where applications are stored and accessed from a central series of homescreens. ... Adding to Ubuntu’s otherworldly, unique feel, the OS is also significantly more touch- and gesture-focused than iOS and Android. We found nearly all the key features and menus on the Meizu MX4 are accessed using gesture controls, not with screen shortcuts. ... Finally, there's my biggest criticism – Ubuntu phone is not smart enough yet. While the app selection is impressive for a prototype, in its infancy Ubuntu phone doesn't have enough data feeding into it, as key services are missing."
So, what is it like to not receive any calls for a month?
Still can't buy one ( in the US ) = still don't care. They told us we would be able to buy them years ago. I'm glad they're still working on it. The fact that soe exist in the wild means I know it's not vaporware. At the same time, I'm starting to think I'll never be able to buy one.
We found nearly all the key features and menus on the Meizu MX4 are accessed using gesture controls, not with screen shortcuts. ...
As it is I am struggling to use most features of a smart phone. I still have not figured out a reliable way to tell which parts of the screen is active and is clickable and which parts are not. For example, today I got into the Google maps directions in the "walking" mode. 13 hours of walking to destination. Could not find a way simply change from walk to car. I have seen the icon, I know it exists. But if you are already in walk mode, switching to car mode was very non-intuitive. I am sure hundreds of young slashdotters will follow up with variations of "I am not getting off your lawn, grandpa".
Now all the key features are through gestures? How are the available gestures indicated on the screen? Or we are expected to go through the entire routine of dressing in drags and doing a hoola? Is it left right left right up up down down A B A B or right left right left up up down down A B A B?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How many developers does it realistically need though?
I think the plan is that once 16.04 is released the devices should be capable of running most any Linux desktop application and while that isn't always the most manageable in a touch environment, it's more of a matter of adapting them for use on a phone instead of having to build an app from scratch.
I'm probably not the typically user in this regard, but I have an iPad and use almost no third party apps, with the only one that gets much frequent use being the YouTube app. Beyond that it's a few games, but the browser and various included media apps are sufficient. Having a huge number of apps also means that it's necessary to weed out a lot of crud that was just made as a quick cash-in move and is laden with ads as a result.
Ubuntu phone doesn't need to have the market share of Android or Apple to be successful just like Linux never needed the market share of Microsoft to be successful.
A few years ago you would be saying "You basically have two major players in mobile OS, Symbian and BlackBerry OS. I don't see that changing..."
Blackberry is dead, Nokia is dead. Android and iOS will die someday too. Ubuntu may be a very very small player, but the licensing and cost will appeal to very low cost hardware makers, and maybe someday Ubuntu phones can flood Chinese and Indian markets. Or they could die as Windows mobile.
2021: "You basically have two major players in mobile OS, Atari and Commodore. I don't see that changing..."
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I was disappointed TFA didn't mention anything about what you might or might not be able to do aside from the normal functions of a phone. It's Ubuntu, after all. Do I get a shell? Do I get root? Can I install Ubuntu packages such as openssh-server, rsync, etc? Is there anything accessible resembling a real Linux environment?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
A few years ago you would be saying "You basically have two major players in mobile OS, Symbian and BlackBerry OS. I don't see that changing..."
Actually prior to the iPhone there was really only 1 major player. Which was Nokia with near 70% global market share with Windows Mobile and BlackBerries taking about up 11% a piece.
It's a prototype device for software development, not a shipping product.
Wrong on both accounts. The MX4 has been a shipping Android phone since September of last year. The Ubuntu phone is the exact same hardware.
It might have a substandard battery.
It does't. GSM Arena stated about 16.5 hours talk time, ~14 hours web browsing and around 9.5 hours for video playback. For the time of the battery benchmarks it was no worse than most other phones.
Such problems would not stop its deployment as a development device. It could be any of these problems and it's pretty pointless to speculate further.
Except it's not a development device.
WIth Ubuntu Phone/Touch (I swear they keep flipping what they're calling it) you get a shell, and last I used it the interface was actually pretty good. However, although many nice packages are shipped installed, you cannot by default install normal packages yourself because the root filesystem is read-only, and is updated as an incremental image with each new version. So you can disable that read-only nature and then install your own packages, but that then disables system upgrades, and if you re-enable system upgrades you are by definition wiping out all your installed packages.
In this respect I've found SailfishOS far more familiar, even though it's an RPM-based distro and I'm far more familiar with DEB-based distros, because SailfishOS under the hood acts exactly like any other distro, it just happens to run on your phone (with much of the gesture-based swishiness of Ubuntu Phone). If I want to install git, I just type "pkcon install git" or whatnot and I get it. If a system library has a bug, I can recompile it with a fix myself and replace the .so. In theory Ubuntu Phone is more open than SailfishOS (which has several components that are closed-source still), but in practice I find SailfishOS far more open in that it doesn't discourage you from playing around under the hood---not to mention that their stack is far more standard (Wayland, PackageKit+RPM, etc) than Ubuntu Phone's stack (with Mir, the whole Snappy thing and "click-packages", etc).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
It's all pretty automatic, nearly zero user knowledge needed. And then you can test it out for yourself instead of doing something both scandalous and in this case useless anyways like RTFA'ing. But no, seriously, if you're curious at all, it really is quite easy to set up, and I do think worth it since you'll far more easily discover what Ubuntu Phone (and any other Linux-based smartphone platform you feel like tinkering with, or other Android ROMs) really is and how you do or don't like it.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Fans of the Ubuntu desktop OS will be glad to know that Whoopsie, Geoclue, and Zeitgeist were among the first apps ported to the Ubuntu phone.
IMHO the biggest strategic blunder of all this mobile Linux distributions is that they break compatibility with standard X11 / Linux. Why be incompatible?
I know for Sailfish the reason was that they could get access to Android drivers more easily by using Wayland instead of X11, but for me it meant that I completely lost interest in Sailfish at this point. Maybe XWayland will run someday... or does it already?
I also still believe that the networking of X11 would be really great if exploited properly - especially for a mobile device: Why can't I move the window of the address book app from my smartphone to my desktop, cut & paste some numbers from another application on my desktop, etc...