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The Case for Ubuntu Phone

gould.cx

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Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#71

Post by epmaybe »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #15
rcarmo wrote: post #10

I applaud the OP's bravery, but after a long, long time in the telco business and having seen many attempts from multiple platforms towards gaining a foothold (Symbian, Maemo, LiMo - including Vodafone's own version - Bada, etc.), I have to point out that Ubuntu Phone, despite the vision and values behind it, is at a massively overwhelming disadvantage in terms of both telco appeal (what I and my former colleagues st…

I think the biggest thing that could probably help the Ubuntu Phone is an approachable development environment. If the road to developing apps for a phone is short enough, that people on their weekend make apps for it, it will expand rapidly with apps. This requires great tooling, and documentation. Potentially even adoption of a programming language that either comes with a powerful SDK or is tailored from the groun…

I'm not sure that this holds true in today's ecosystem. Yes, developers may come to the platform, but the big companies won't come unless the consumers come to the platform. And consumers won't come unless Facebook, Snapchat, etc show up.

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#72

Post by dqv »

rsync wrote: post #67

We really need something like "GNU phoneutils" ... a big package of command line utilities to control and manipulate a telephone. I really, really want to do things like this: cat file | sms -send -n 4157771234 grep mom addresses | awk (field with phonenumber) | dial --nobusy --retry 3 That is to say, I want a unix phone . I want to run the phone with unix and unix commands. Certainly not all of the time, but some of…

You could try freeswitch which has some fun cli stuff. mod_portaudio lets you make and take calls from your terminal (although you have to use fs_cli, but you can alias dial to fs_cli -x"pa call $1"). There are a few sms modules as well.

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#73

Post by seabrookmx »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #15
rcarmo wrote: post #10

I applaud the OP's bravery, but after a long, long time in the telco business and having seen many attempts from multiple platforms towards gaining a foothold (Symbian, Maemo, LiMo - including Vodafone's own version - Bada, etc.), I have to point out that Ubuntu Phone, despite the vision and values behind it, is at a massively overwhelming disadvantage in terms of both telco appeal (what I and my former colleagues st…

I think the biggest thing that could probably help the Ubuntu Phone is an approachable development environment. If the road to developing apps for a phone is short enough, that people on their weekend make apps for it, it will expand rapidly with apps. This requires great tooling, and documentation. Potentially even adoption of a programming language that either comes with a powerful SDK or is tailored from the groun…

Curious why you say Go comes with a lot out of the box. Compared to Python or Java I find it pretty lacking. And even more so when you include 3rd party libraries and the fact that Go has no package manager ala. pip or Ivy.

Android Studio is a pretty mature well documented way to make apps so if anyone is truly determined and has some programming experience, making a simple Android app in a weekend is doable. I've heard (but don't know personally) that the iOS toolchain is even easier to use.

That all aside, nobody will WANT to spend their weekend making Ubuntu apps when nobody has a phone to run them.

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#74

Post by slitaz »

oelmekki wrote: post #29

The paragraph focused on carriers in this article makes me wonder : can ubuntu mobile guarantee OEM won't install any uninstallable apps as well? I only buy nexus phones precisely because I don't want the carriers and OEM stuff, they always have been a bad experience for me. I can see how "build your own bundle" is a selling point for carriers, but it's hardly one for users. That being said, I'm excited to see a true…

With the present phones, Canonical provides all the packages and the full ROM files. There is no feature yet for phones that cannot be rooted so I do not see such risk.

There is a feature for Snapdragon SoCs that can enable dual-boot. For others, it is still difficult or impossible.

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#75

Post by Fnoord »

slitaz wrote: post #55
mamon wrote: post #17

I would like to try Ubuntu Phone but I cannot find it anywhere. Canonical's page says that all devices are out of stock, various online stores say exactly the same thing, and all the devices that are listed as compatibile (Nexus 5 for instance) are two generations old and also hard to come by. The only option I haven't tried is buying used phone on eBay, because they usually come in pretty bad shape so I want brand n…

You can get the tablet bq M10 now. Or you can preorder the Fair phone 2, the version with Ubuntu preinstalled.

You can run a version of Android without Google ("Google Mobile Services") on FP2. This is called Fairphone Open OS [1].

[1] https://code.fairphone.com/

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#76

Post by slitaz »

vegabook wrote: post #22

But I can't actually buy an Ubuntu phone anymore. And I want to because I lost me aquaris E5. This is not a good situation even for the most committed and patient early adopters (like me).

Have a look at the Fairphone 2. It is on preorder and can get the Ubuntu veraion.

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#77

Post by morganvachon »

sverige wrote: post #65
morganvachon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, dual SIM card phones are not offered on any phones built for the US market, since carriers make a lot of their money from financing new phones. Actually there are plenty of dual SIM models available in the US from US companies that are 100% compatible with US carriers, you just have to be willing to open a browser and shop for five minutes. I am currently using a Microsoft Lumia 650 dual SIM phone, pur…

I stand corrected. I was not shopping for smartphones this time around, so hadn't looked at those. There isn't nearly as much variety in basic phones and feature phones offered in the US.

You're right, and that's unfortunate. I wanted a basic phone for porting out my Google voice number to my carrier when I decided to stop using all Google services, but there wasn't anything worth having that was cheaper than a smartphone. So, since I was buying a new smartphone anyway, I went with a dual SIM model.

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#78

Post by quanticle »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #62
quanticle wrote: post #58

The biggest strength and weakness of Ubuntu Phone is that it's a device without an intrinsic set of services. If you buy an Android device, you get Google Services. If you buy an iPhone, you get Apple services. What he's missing is that the device is pretty much useless without the services. The services are as necessary to the functionality of the device as say, filesystem drivers are on an operating system. Yes, it…

If they're trying to target the same customers that buy Apple and Android for the services and all the other skin-deep beauty, I think they're going to fail for sure. Hopefully, there's enough people that just want a general purpose computer with and open source operating system that just happens to include cellular internet connection (bonuses for me would be a a hardware keyboard, is at a size that actually fits in…

    Hopefully, there's enough people that just want a general purpose computer 
    with and open source operating system that just happens to include cellular 
    internet connection (bonuses for me would be a a hardware keyboard, is at a 
    size that actually fits in your pocket and has a hard switch to disconnect 
    it from the network)
There aren't. I'm sorry, but the number of people who actually truly care about "general purpose computing" and privacy just isn't high enough to form a viable market segment for any but the most specialized of hardware vendors. If it were not the case, we'd have seen a lot more phones with truly open hardware and software stacks.

That said, if you're willing to relax the "pocketability" requirement, a laptop running GNU/Linux and tethered to your phone fulfills every other requirement.

(PS: What is it with the "hardware keyboard" requirement? It's not like you're going to be writing the next great American novel on your phone. For text messaging and short e-mails what difference does it make?)

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#79

Post by Steveoz5 »

Many comments same/similar to "I would like to try Ubuntu Phone but I cannot find it anywhere."

Well, I got tired of waiting, so I bought a NEW Meizu Pro 5 (Flyme Edition) and installed Ubuntu.

Works great. New phone, with warranty, running Ubuntu.

What's more, the Pro 5 runs a Exynos 7420 (ARMv8-A) so is likely to run the Xenial based snap image when released by Canonical.

Re: The Case for Ubuntu Phone

#80

Post by Steveoz5 »

Many comments same/similar to "I would like to try Ubuntu Phone but I cannot find it anywhere."

Well, I got tired of waiting, so I bought a NEW Meizu Pro 5 (Flyme Edition) and installed Ubuntu.

Works great. New phone, with warranty, running Ubuntu.

What's more the Pro 5 runs a Exynos 7420 (ARMv8-A) so is likely to run the Xenial based snap image when released by Canonical.

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