News January 2, 2013

Canonical Outs New Ubuntu for Phones

The New Year has barely begun, but there’s something BIG going on at Ubuntu’s parent company, Canonical! Today Canonical has announced a version of Ubuntu for Mobile phones. According to Canonical, Ubuntu for Mobile Phones should have this on hardware to demonstrate at CES 2013.

Canonical says that the SDK has everything developers need. The interface certainly looks nice, but they have not announced hardware vendors or carriers yet. A phone OS without hardware is pretty useless. They say they are in talks, but they said that when they outed Ubuntu TV at CES last year, and there STILL isn’t a hardware vendor for that.

The open source lover in me loves this idea and wants it to work, but if Canonical can’t attract a hardware vendor or carrier, then what’s the use? OMGUbuntu has a story that indicates that this should run on devices powered by a quad-core ARM A9 Processor, but I still say: show me hardware. Otherwise this is vapor.

Update 1/2/2013: The Verge has posted a video of a walk through the OS as installed on a Galaxy Nexus. That video is below.

Tags: Linux, Mobile Phones

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About Joel McLaughlin

View all posts by Joel McLaughlin

Joel is a system admin for a local college in Columbus, OH. While he loves Linux and tends to use it more than anything else, he will stoop to running closed source if it is the best tool for the job. His techno passions are Linux, Android, netbooks, GPS, podcasting and Amateur Radio.

cgavula

I think the bigger problem is that they are talking 2014 for an actual product release – way too late, I think, if they have any hope to be successful.
- http://www.geardiary.com/ Michael Anderson
  
  And as Joel said, even then there is no hardware partner so it isn’t clear exact
  Y who would be making the device!
  - http://twitter.com/gorkon Joel McLaughlin
    
    Yep! I plan on doing a deeper why this won’t work post later. I mean I HOPE I am wrong as I really want to see this work….which is why I am worried. I don’t like how it’s starting.