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Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

engadget.com

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Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#121

Post by r3m6 »

maratd wrote: post #116
polshaw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings Connect a display and you have full ubuntu. With today's smartphones already computationally competitive with your standard netbook, that alone is a massive value proposition to me. Add something like motorola's lapdock and there is 95% of all my computing needs met, all with a single, central data sto…

> Connect a display and you have full ubuntu. I didn't see this mentioned in the keynote. I was specifically looking for it and there were zero mentions?

Mark S. mentions it in the Engadget interview: "If I dock this, I can get the full Ubuntu desktop".

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#122

Post by steevdave »

mtgx wrote: post #95
JoshTriplett wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone/operators-and-oems : > Ubuntu has already been adapted to run on chipsets using the ARM and Intel x86 architectures relevant for mobile devices, with the core system based around a typical Android Board Support Package (BSP). So chipset vendors and hardware manufacturers do not need to invest in or maintain new hardware support packages for Ubuntu on smartphones. In short,…

But that doesn't say anything about being related in any way with Android code, does it? Also I think since kernel 3.3 Android uses the exact same kernel as other Linux distros. The Android kernel got merged with the normal Linux kernel. So I don't see why it would be a problem for them to use the same kernel.

Not everything from Android is in the mainline kernels. There are still a few bits that are Android specific that would need to be reworked to even be accepted into staging.

There has been a lot of great ARM work lately in mainline too but there are still quite a few drivers missing that you can't even get docs for (even with signing NDAs) so the drivers for mainline get written based on the BSP-ish kernel drivers which aren't always written the best.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#123

Post by joe_the_user »

macspoofing wrote: post #89
mladenkovacevic wrote: post #68

This announcement baffles me a little bit. An Ubuntu Phone? Why did they choose to announce a phone OS and not a tablet? Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them. Ubuntu is a full featured OS used in creating and consuming long-form content. If they are hoping to engage with existing OEMs I think they would've had a much better time of it with compan…

>Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them ... ... in 2005. Phones are powerful computing devices, and they are big business.

The phone could have a supercomputer inside it. It's common use-case would like be according to the quote. A small screen and limited keyboard take its toll regardless of computing power.

The big business part is true but tablets also are big and could make some sense as an Ubuntu platform.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#124

Post by mars »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #68

This announcement baffles me a little bit. An Ubuntu Phone? Why did they choose to announce a phone OS and not a tablet? Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them. Ubuntu is a full featured OS used in creating and consuming long-form content. If they are hoping to engage with existing OEMs I think they would've had a much better time of it with compan…

if it runs on android compatible phones it will also run on android compatible tablets.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#125

Post by marshray »

sliverstorm wrote: post #111
macspoofing wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them ... ... in 2005. Phones are powerful computing devices, and they are big business.

Yup. Phones are still not as powerful as standard computers, but I would hazard the good ones are at least as fast as a laptop from 5 years ago. (Guess what OS I was running on my laptops 5 years ago?)

As a data point my newest phone (Nexus 4) is a 1.5 GHz quad-core with 2 GB of RAM and a GPU good for OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.2.

Except for hard drive size and bandwidth, it's the same or better than the dual core laptop I had 5 years ago.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#126

Post by marshray »

I'm feeling lazy after the holidays.

Does anyone have a good argument for why any smartphone manufacturer (or carrier) would choose Ubuntu Phone over official or opensource Android?

EDIT: OK, I've broken down and watched the video.

Sounds like an important featre is the unified enterprise management with existing Ubuntu servers and desktops.

I wonder if this will prove attractive to the remaining Blackberry holdouts?

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#127

Post by mladenkovacevic »

buster wrote: post #90
mladenkovacevic wrote: post #68

This announcement baffles me a little bit. An Ubuntu Phone? Why did they choose to announce a phone OS and not a tablet? Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them. Ubuntu is a full featured OS used in creating and consuming long-form content. If they are hoping to engage with existing OEMs I think they would've had a much better time of it with compan…

Ultimately this leads to my dream of only carrying a phone with all my stuff on,going to work, place it in a dock and start working with the phone as my PC replacement.

I agree this is the dream. Just one small device with a super-CPU that you carry around and it interfaces with displays all around you. Perhaps with Miracast and Airplay this future is not that far off.

I also can't wait until the day we don't have to charge our mobile devices (solar + kinetic charging in every phone)

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#128

Post by webjprgm »

buster wrote: post #90
mladenkovacevic wrote: post #68

This announcement baffles me a little bit. An Ubuntu Phone? Why did they choose to announce a phone OS and not a tablet? Phones are light communication devices for sending brief messages, checking social statuses or updating them. Ubuntu is a full featured OS used in creating and consuming long-form content. If they are hoping to engage with existing OEMs I think they would've had a much better time of it with compan…

Ultimately this leads to my dream of only carrying a phone with all my stuff on,going to work, place it in a dock and start working with the phone as my PC replacement.

So what's the difference between having cloud-based accounts and documents that sync between phone, tablet, and desktop? Then you can go to work and without even taking your phone out of your pocket (or even if you forgot it on your bed stand) you can start working with all your same stuff.

I believe Apple looks at the problem this way. Rather than have one piece of hardware act as all devices, they have multiple pieces of hardware that share the needed parts. (Though they haven't finished making it quite as useful as I'd like it to be.)

One of my concerns has been privacy. In this case what I mean is that I don't want Apple or Dropbox or Google or Canonical to own my data in it's cloud. I would probably be satisfied with a solution that only stored encrypted data in the cloud so that those data storage providers could not possibly access my data (so they couldn't be allowed to have my encryption key). I would also be satisfied with a way of hosting a cloud storage platform on my own servers (which would likely be a VPS, so I'd have to encrypt it anyway or else Linode etc. would have my data).

If we go the route of using the phone as the center, then we also need to add the capability into the Linux kernel to connect to external computing resources, like CPUs and GPUs. Then we're not limited to just a "thin client" type of desktop, but could have a full powered one.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#129

Post by webjprgm »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #127
buster wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately this leads to my dream of only carrying a phone with all my stuff on,going to work, place it in a dock and start working with the phone as my PC replacement.

I agree this is the dream. Just one small device with a super-CPU that you carry around and it interfaces with displays all around you. Perhaps with Miracast and Airplay this future is not that far off. I also can't wait until the day we don't have to charge our mobile devices (solar + kinetic charging in every phone)

Or wireless tesla-coil charging. Or just inductive charging, but put the inductive chargers in desktop and office chairs so that it's a fairly automatic and invisible process.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#130

Post by iamtherockstar »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #12

This is a good thing, but having known Canonical and Ubuntu since the start (2004), I would really love to see them succeed in the desktop market first. This initiative will de-focus their efforts. I admire them, and wish them good luck anyway.

On the contrary, due it being the same base, it will actually make the apps faster and more memory performant on the desktop, because it has to run in a constrained environment on mobile. I think it'll make for a more performant desktop OS.
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