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DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

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Re: DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

#71

Post by darklajid »

twblalock wrote: post #23

> When I first started using the phone I noticed the Today scope showed temperatures in the weather forecast in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. This can be adjusted by changing our selected language in the device's settings panel and restarting the phone . Really? You have to restart to change the temperature units? What a joke.

The real issue is "You have to change your language to change the temperature units". There's no correlation between those. That is one broken scope/widget if the author is correct.

Re: DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

#72

Post by mavhc »

Sylos wrote: post #70
mavhc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they support upgrading yet though? If I wanted to reinstall my OS every year I'd go back to using Windows 95

You can manually edit the APT-sources to point to the new release and then let it perform a dist-upgrade, which is, as far as I understand it, the same as Ubuntu or Fedora do automatically. The Linux Mint devs just don't think that's a good way of handling upgrades, so they don't have a button for it. You can read their reasoning here in section E : https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

Except unlike the other OSes, they don't test it.

That's why I went back to Ubuntu

Re: DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

#73

Post by allendoerfer »

darklajid wrote: post #71
twblalock wrote: post #23

> When I first started using the phone I noticed the Today scope showed temperatures in the weather forecast in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. This can be adjusted by changing our selected language in the device's settings panel and restarting the phone . Really? You have to restart to change the temperature units? What a joke.

The real issue is "You have to change your language to change the temperature units". There's no correlation between those. That is one broken scope/widget if the author is correct.

While I agree, that it should be changeable independently, there is a very strong correlation between language and temperature units.

Re: DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

#74

Post by tluyben2 »

I would like this phone because, I assume, I can inspect and change the kernel and all other OSS software on it. What I don't get is, with their focus on emerging markets, why it needs to be so expensive. If they would focus more on performance they could have one for $100. I recently bought some iPhone clone in China, and besides the software, it's a fine phone; most people who see me with it immediately want one. It was $65 and works fine for most things I use smartphones for, even, to my surprise, taking great pictures. Battery life is around 8 hours/day with quite heavy use, the GPS performance is total crap (I think this is a software issue), but for $65 this is a nice device (it feels great as it's a 6s+ ripoff casing wise). But proprietary software in as much that I can't swap out the kernel and the rip off iOS on-top-of-Android is quite painful. If someone would just equip these phones with something fully OSS (minus a few drivers possibly) I don't think I would buy anything else.

Re: DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

#75

Post by skykooler »

dingaling wrote: post #18
forvelin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you checked Jolla [1] with a keyboard other half ? [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2028347278/tohkbd-the-o...

Seemed lke a good idea, but unfortunately: FAQs to which the answer is no: Can I order? Can I get TOHKBD? Are you sad to close the store? ... TOHKBD? Can I buy? I'm also in the market for a high-spec smartphone with hardware keyboard but the only realy candidate was the Blackberry PRIV. However it has an encrypted bootloader with no ability to bypass, so not an option.

TOHKBDs do occasionally show up on eBay, though. It took me about two months to be able to get my hands on one.

Re: DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

#77

Post by dharma1 »

Brakenshire wrote: post #57
dmca wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for this OS but I use OsmAnd ( http://osmand.net ) in place of google maps on cyanogenmod and it does do a reasonable job of voice navigation (using the same OpenStreetMap data as uNav). It's open source so it should be able to work in principle.

I agree there are good applications available, but OSMAnd is an Android app, you'd need some sort of compatibility layer for it to run on stock Linux. I think there is work going on for that happen, but it's not there yet. The project I can recall is Shashlik, there are one or two others as well. I think Android app compatibility is necessary for a Linux phone. You won't be able to use Play Services, but a lot of app…

Hopefully Google will open source the container based approach they use for enabling Android apps on Chrome OS

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/05/chrome-os-android-a...

Re: DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

#78

Post by jstanley »

I run Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 4, and have done for about 6 months now. It is slow and the mail client often crashes. And it doesn't have Snapchat. And the camera app is rubbish.

Apart from that, it is a lot less stressful to use than Android. I got fed up with it being slow at one point and reinstalled Android, and it had so many nag screens about reporting data to Google, and so many privacy options that I had to be sure to configure correctly, that I put Ubuntu back on it the same day.

I carry a second phone to run Snapchat and take photos.

EDIT: They do make you sign up for an account before you can download apps from the store, which completely boggles my mind. Their singular advantage over Android is that they don't hassle you for information, yet they almost throw that away by making you sign up to download apps. I just used a fake account, but I wish they didn't make you sign up.

Re: DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review

#80

Post by luxpir »

ashitlerferad wrote: post #7
jaimex2 wrote: post #4

I do miss my Nokia n900 running Maemo, this might be as close to a replacement as it'll get. Just need a phone with a good built in keyboard.

https://neo900.org/

The €480 quoted on the site covers 40% of the final price. I paid ~€130 for the Ubuntu phone and I don't intend to ever pay more than 2x that for a smartphone. But it'd have to be special. Truly converge PC/phone, then I may pay closer to PC prices.

EDIT: I had and thoroughly enjoyed my N900 for many years.

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