51–60 of 65 posts
It seems a shame that the backing of a network operator is still required to successfully sell a hardware device in this day and age (especially in the US). It's like only being able to buy a Thinkpad if your broadband supplier will sell you one. I look forward to the day when most phones are not tied into contracts, but I think I may be waiting a long time.
The problem is that any Ubuntu phone that is released will likely be just as locked down and filled with bloatware as everything else with Verizon.
iPhone doesn't come with bloatware? Why couldn't Ubuntu pull that off as Apple has? Less bargaining leverage, I guess...
My parents both got Androids recently, and while you can "hide" the pre-installed bloatware you still can't delete it. It took me about 30 minutes to clean the phones of all the widgets and crapware.
As the newcomer, a Ubuntu phone really wouldn't have any bargaining power and would be as bad or worse than Android.
I'm encouraged but I watched the video here: http://www.ubuntu.com/phone We can't lock the phone? The phone decides how to search? Developers empowered by Java on Android would have to go back 1 or 2 decades to C or C++ to make apps? That's sounding pretty limiting.
Yes, you can lock the phone. The main programming environment is QML, not C or C++.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think its killer feature is how it's an all-in-one OS. In you pocket, it's a smartphone; docked, it's a complete linux desktop environment.
I thought that was a feature for 'Ubuntu for Android' (a different product). I could be wrong, but I don't see that feature available under the 'Ubuntu Phone' list of features.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you can lock the phone. The main programming environment is QML, not C or C++.
The way I heard Mark state it, it sounded like you don't lock the phone and sounded specifically to me like you can't lock the phone. He mentioned C/C++ within milliseconds after mentioning QML. If QML is sufficient for achieving what Java can great, for those people who want to go back to Qt. I think Qt went out with Nokia. Why didn't they choose Gtk? Why not Java for the language? Why re-invent the wheel with their…
It seems a shame that the backing of a network operator is still required to successfully sell a hardware device in this day and age (especially in the US). It's like only being able to buy a Thinkpad if your broadband supplier will sell you one. I look forward to the day when most phones are not tied into contracts, but I think I may be waiting a long time.
There is no such relationship with the phone manufacturers or retailers, with the Apple exception, and even they depend on carriers. (You can fairly accurately predict Apple sales by how many carriers carry the devices.)
Note that being available on a carrier doesn't automatically lead to success (eg Blackberry and Nokia are available on about 3 times as many carriers as Apple is). However it is a prerequisite for getting a foot in the door.
This might be a bad thing for Ubuntu. Verizon will preload crapware onto the phone to death thereby negating whatever value proposition the OS has.
They've announced a number of companies to join their CAG. What is missing so far is any firm commitment that anyone is going to release one of these devices; without stuff likely to ship I don't see much likelihood of app developers doing anything on this platform.
Making that minimum order quantity means the carrier has to actively promote and support sales of iPhones.
As you state, I doubt the CAG includes any form of minimum order quantity, which means there aren't any incentives for the carriers to promote the phones. Canonical rather than the carriers will need to do demand generation. Samsung has a fairly high cost of sales (~25% compared to Apple at 10%). And nobody plays until you are spending a billion or more in advertising: http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/02/the-cost-of-selling-galaxie...
Firefox phone at least has the advantage of hundreds of millions of Firefox users which allows a degree of familiarity and awareness. By comparison Ubuntu is a rounding error.
Canonical have a massive hill to climb here. The CAG is at the base of the hill. I wonder what their strategy will be?
I'm bored by Ubuntu, much less the promise of a Ubuntu smartphone. I thought the appeal of Ubuntu was that it was a freedom-respecting but user-friendly alternative to Windows and Mac. Turn out, their Unity interface ships your desktop search results off to Amazon and tried to sell you something when searching for a program or a file on your system. So, for a Ubuntu phone, at least on the privacy/respect front, it's…
We all know what that means.