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."

Comments

A month with a Ubuntu phone

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what is it like to not receive any calls for a month?

Re:A month with a Ubuntu phone

[trampel]

And what is it like to give up all the apps you use on a daily basis and replace them with links to mobile versions of that app's website?

Some would consider this an advantage. I'm quite happy to use the web versions of e.g. Facebook and Twitter on my smartphone, and not their apps.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1174/

Re:A month with a Ubuntu phone

[ChunderDownunder]

Well I for one am content with a 'dumbphone'.

I have a desktop PC for my computing needs and the cloud services I need while in transit are adequately served by the web. If I'm restless on public transport I'll whip out my e-reader and read a chapter of a book rather than fiddling with an app.

Still can't buy one

[bananaquackmoo]

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.

I hate it already!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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?

Re:I hate it already!

[nine-times]

I agree with your criticism about gestures. I had the same general problem with Windows 8 when it first came out: a lot of the features in the metro UI were hidden under some kind of obscured interaction. Hover over this area, and you get one menu. Hover in a different location, and something else happens. Right click when you're in this application, and it pops up with a menu from the bottom. Right click somewhere else, and it does something different. Drag down, swipe left, do a little dance, and some kind of other magic happens. What are all the features? Who knows what you'll find next!

It also reminds me of Apple's reluctance to have two-button mice. A lot of people made fun of it as pure stupidity, or as though it was a technological failure. It was a design choice. Apple designers didn't like context menus, since context menus mean that right-clicking in different places and in different contexts produced different menus, and the user had no real way of knowing what would be in a context menu ahead of time. The only way to learn context menus is to right-click in various places and try to discern what the pattern is, and hope that the developer was consistent. It's rumored that a big part of the reason Apple has stuck with one-button mice is that, if you're not relying on context menus, multiple buttons are largely unnecessary for normal productivity uses, and not having multiple buttons deters developers from putting important functions in context menus.

Re:I hate it already!

[bill_mcgonigle]

Gestures can be incredibly useful but mostly they're wildly abused by programmers who are not UI designers.

Here's an example: in Chrome, if I pinch to zoom in on a screen, a minor variant of that gesture (I haven't discerned what it is yet) will destroy the current browser window. So about 20% of the time I zoom I lose my session. No 'undo' close either.

Developers, *please*: give me an option to disable all data-destructive gestures. I'll turn them on if I feel like juggling chainsaws on a given day.

Re:Developers will not come

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:Developers will not come

[thoriumbr]

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.

Re:Battery life not so great

[Lunix Nutcase]

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.

Shell, yes. But with caveats; contrast SailfishOS

[Phil Urich]

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?

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).