We need unlocked phones ... not another screen manager and drivers ...
Nexus; next question?
How to buy it free of contract outside US is a good one ... it has very limited availability.
Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
131–140 of 221 posts
Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#132My favorite part of Ubuntu Phone and Firefox OS is that they treat HTML5 as a first class citizen. Native development would be so much simpler if all platforms did the same.
Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#133Earlier 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.
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 pie…
> So what's the difference between having cloud-based accounts and documents that sync between phone, tablet, and desktop?
No internet required.
Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#134It would have been great if they released with a "Try it now on your rooted Android devices".
Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#135I'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?
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Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Those specs don't speak to performance. Your 5 year old computer could easily run Windows 8 without a problem and the Nexus 4 can't.
Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#137"...there are no immediate plans for actual Ubuntu phones, and no carriers have been signed up yet -- although we're told that the OS will run on any new phone built for Android, should the manufacturer see merit in installing Ubuntu instead." It will be interesting to see if/when a manufacturer picks this up, to hit the mainstream market.
Why the hell do I need manufacturer blessing?? I own the phone. Give me a ROM, Canonical.
No serious company wants the responsibility of bricking someone's smartphone.
Where it would get interesting is if they introduced this as a UML guest Android app.
Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop I used to agree with this but it has gotten incrementally a lot better in the last couple of releases. I've watched non-geeks figure out how to use it without trouble, and after all the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks.
> it has gotten incrementally a lot better I keep hearing people say this, I keep trying it again and I keep being disappointed and going back to Xfce. I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing. Not likely to try desktop Unity a fourth time, no matter how many people say “it's gettin…
I'm waiting a few years. I think eventually they'll get it right. With every update, they're slowly fixing and improving things.
I'm using OS X, and I love it. But I think Apple is going to fuck it up eventually, somehow. And hopefully, by then, Ubuntu will be a good choice.
Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Swiping from the left and right edges on phones is prone to get confused with the swiping inside apps, that's the reason that none of the big mobile OSes have it. I am curious to see whether that's taken care of here.
This is already a problem with Chrome for iOS. It makes building apps in the browser difficult when swiping on the left and right edges triggers a "tab" switch.
Chrome for Android does the same (you can change tabs by swiping left-right), and it's very unreliable - I manage to change tabs by accident by swiping, but can never do that on purpose...
Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Those specs don't speak to performance. Your 5 year old computer could easily run Windows 8 without a problem and the Nexus 4 can't.
Serious question: What is the use of "running Windows 8" per se? Traditionally, computing platforms are for applications and operating systems are a means to that end.
What class of applications (from 5 years ago) would have inherent performance issues with Nexus4-class hardware (assuming a real external display and hard drive were added)?
Also, it occurs to me that Surface RT is largely Windows 8 and Office running on very comparable hardware. I have a Surface RT, it runs this stuff quite well.