Intro

The mobile phone market is an ever changing place and companies that were once on top may find themselves at the bottom of the food chain after short periods of time. It happened to Nokia which was steamrolled by Apple and Google, and also Blackberry. While both companies are still in the business, they have a hard time winning back lost market share.

Ubuntu, the company responsible for the popular Linux distribution of the same name, has just announced Ubuntu for Phones which was unveiled for the first time on this year’s CES in Las Vegas from between January 7-11, 2013. The phone comes in two main flavors, first as an entry level Ubuntu smartphone and then as a Ubuntu superphone which not only includes everything the entry level provides but also with desktop convergence capabilities. What this means? You can connect the phone to a computer monitor to use it as a thin client.

It is also an all new open source smartphone operating system which is basically a fully featured Ubuntu, but with an all new interface that is designed for touch screen interaction. Since Ubuntu is an open source project, so is Ubuntu for Phone and hence there will be 100% transparency. This also means that we will be getting interim ROMs using which we can test the software and report bugs.

While devices running Ubuntu for Phone aren’t expected to come in the market before 2014, Engineering Manager in Product Strategy for Canonical, Alan Pope, recently said that they will be publishing the images by late February. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has already made it clear that Ubuntu for Phone ROM can be flashed onto any Android device using a relatively easy process.

Here is a quick look on the system requirements.

System Requirements

Entry Level Ubuntu Smartphone - 1Ghz Cortex A9, 512MB or 1GB of RAM and support for 4-8GB eMMC + SD; Should support multitouch.

High End "Superphone" - Quad-core A9 or Intel Atom, at least 1GB of RAM and Min 32GB eMMC + SD.

Outro

As of now, some of us have seen Galaxy Nexus running the true open source mobile OS, and looking on the hands on video, the operating system looks very laggy. There is a great lag while scrolling up and down, and that’s alright since what some of us saw was probably the Alpha version, and there is a lot of scope for improvement. That’s one main reason why they are holding back the ROM release and waiting until late February. Work is definitely being done on the platform, and it seems that Ubuntu for phones has already gotten a performance update.

Also, here's the video mentioned.

http://vimeo.com/56944191

Added another video. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YId_dwE99U

My Feedback

Not sure what to think of these news but I do know that I'm pretty stoked about this new device/OS and I really can't wait to at least try it out in a phone store or something.

Tell me what you think about this by replying.