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Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

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191–200 of 221 posts

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hopefully porting from linux will be fairly straightforward too.. just a new UI support?, giving apps that work from desktop to mobile. Not to mention that is has most of the FFOS advantage too. I wouldn't trivialise the effort required to create a touch-friendly UI, especially from an existing desktop application (with the expectations that go with it).

Well, you're assuming they would need a new UI. You know what would be really nice to have on a phone if it didn't take any real effort to get it there? bash, ssh, nfs/sshfs/samba, etc. I know the typical user isn't going to care, but I could see how it would be a big win for developers , and as we all know, "developers developers developers."

That didn't work out for Maemo. Is this time going to be different?

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#192

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.

iOS app ports certainly seem to be popular on OS X.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#193

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?

This one is easy. Nexus X.

Imagine if you are Samsung and you now must compete with Google releasing their own phone from google owned motorola. All those non-Google companies that now release Android phones should be looking past Android to something else. If they aren't, they are going to be extremely sorry in 2-4 years.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#194
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you're assuming they would need a new UI. You know what would be really nice to have on a phone if it didn't take any real effort to get it there? bash, ssh, nfs/sshfs/samba, etc. I know the typical user isn't going to care, but I could see how it would be a big win for developers , and as we all know, "developers developers developers."

That didn't work out for Maemo. Is this time going to be different?

I don't know. But Maemo didn't also happen to be the most popular desktop Linux distribution. And it was effectively abandoned at birth by its creators, which I have a suspicion Canonical is not about to do.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#195

Those swiping gestures from the edges look incredibly cumbersome and awkward. It may look cool in a demo, but performing that repeatedly to use my phone throughout the day looks to be a bad experience.

The n9 does this. It's actually really enjoyable. I've been using it for a few months.

I find myself so used to it I keep trying to do it on android phones.

The n9 form factor does suit these gestures because it has a screen with smoothly bevelled edges that entices you to swipe.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#196

Earlier 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.

How does running Windows 8 gauge performance of a device?

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Interestingly, I find the gestures from the side work much better on the Nexus 4 with the screen curve. Seems they designed the phone with chrome in mind.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#198

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.

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.

The increased processing power of phones will eventually allow many people to replace their PCs with a phone dock. This massive shift of behaviour will have other consequences in how we use our phones. Besides gaming and graphics, the latent processing power when mobile will be used for machine learning and computer vision purposes. These two technologies allow us to harness some incredible power from our devices even with limited inputs.

Imagine having a fully searchable and indexed transcript of your interlingual phone calls available in realtime, and those words are added to your keyboard prediction that is synced with your account. After just getting off a phonecall with your japanese boss about the board of Newmark Industries, you could sit down at a desk and write a document with correct spellings of each board member's names (you are prompted if you would like them added to your contacts). Your phone finds a route to their head office in the background and tells you which specific route to drive there based on historic traffic combined with current traffic (both foot and vehicular traffic, of course).

The sensing capabilities of phones are getting better and better. GPS is getting more accurate and lower powered. Weather prediction is improving due to remote sensing of cellphone barometers. Machine learning and computer vision techniques are improving for augmentation, prediction, and more.

Phones are a big deal. They are the only technological device (besides glasses and watches) that we carry everywhere. Maybe flexible displays will allow us to have phones without the physical limitations that you describe.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#199
post #115

What I really want isn't a special Ubuntu Phone. It's a proper Linux running on Android devices, that's tailored for mobile usage. This looks great but I'd like to see it on my Android phone instead of Android.

Did you watch the video? You dock your phone and you've got the full desktop. This ubuntu phone is literally the FULL ubuntu desktop with a new UI on top. The only thing docking does is switch you to your desktop environment.

Yes I did watch it. I probably wasn't precise about what I meant. The emphasis was the "running on Android devices" part. I'd really like to see ROMs for existing devices rather than waiting for an entirely new Ubuntu Phone.

Given that by today, Ubuntu is (with a few possible exceptions) always installed on a machine after buying it, releasing a ROM seems more natural than trying to convince manufacturers to adopt it. Don't get me wrong, I would definitely like to see a phone shipping with this and if it's any good on the hardware side I'd probably buy it. For now, I wish for a ROM though.

Re: Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

#200
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.

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…

Exactly. I don't want and can't store work documents on some 3rd party system in the cloud. And my whole point is to have one piece of hardware and not half a dozen. Of course Apple would like you to buy all kinds of hardware instead of one :P

Currently, i am carrying my laptop from and to my workplace and i'd like to get rid of that.

My guess is that the current highend phones already suffice for most of my work. The one part that is missing is virtualization for the occasional VMWare use..

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