

Ubuntu Off to a Promising Start on Smartphones - sk2code
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511756/ubuntu-off-to-a-promising-start-on-smartphones/

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ChuckMcM
I've been watching this with some interest. It was particularly interesting to
see how much better Canonical did creating a credible
'desktop->laptop->tablet->phone' design for an OS than Microsoft did.
Microsoft could do a lot worse than just copy it.

That said, Glass and what not threaten to upset the applecart. There is a lot
of potential in the 'smart brick in your pocket' linking to a variety of UI
devices around your body, that has yet to be played out.

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bebop
I think it will be really interesting to see if this will also do something
like Ubuntu for Android, where you will be able to dock the phone and have a
full version of Ubuntu Desktop.

I could see being able to use this as a development machine (Django/Flask/RoR)
that you can take with you. I would have one setup docking station at work,
and one in my home office. I would no longer need to keep two or more machines
in sync via vcs/database dumps. Things are looking up.

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jiggy2011
Maybe, if you are using your desktop PC mainly as an SSH terminal. OTOH there
are always going to be tradeoffs between things like weight/battery life and
power.

I assume my smartphone would choke if I threw all the stuff I use on my
desktop (eclipse,photoshop,VMs,emulators etc) at it. You might be able to make
a smartphone that can do this but then it's unlikely to last as long on
batteries or be as lightweight as one that couldn't.

Regardless of what computer I'm using , my work is never more than a dropbox
sync or git pull away.

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bebop
Yeah, as far as batter life, I was assuming that any heavy lifting would be
done when it was in a docking station and charging. Used like a normal phone
when not, as I would never try and program with a touch keyboard.

Yeah, dropbox and VCS' work. My main problem is that if I just want to quickly
do a few things, it becomes a time burden to spend 5 minutes or so doing the
sync (and other things like db updates, what have you). This little extra time
sometimes destroys my motivation to work on something real.

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jiggy2011
Once you start putting extra hardware into the docking station to do heavy
lifting you essentially end up back where you are now with a mobile device
that can do some but not all tasks but also acts as a mobile filestore.

I would imagine that as broadband speeds become faster we will see a
diversification of devices rather than the other way around. Things like
kindle , roku and xbox seem to be selling a lot better than things like MS
Surface for example.

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ibudiallo
Ubuntu is already takin huge market in the desktop and server space. I have
made the full switch. It will be very interesting to see how it tackles
smartphone . Just thinking 'Sudo Apt-get install Apache' gives me the shivers

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zanny
pacman -S apache!

That presents an interesting prospect - once Ubuntu hits phones, and there is
a proven infrastructure for "mobile" distros, will we see the mass
proliferation of such OSes? There is nothing inherent to the phone that makes
it harder to have distro like behavior on, just that since it is mainly a
media consumption device it would probably be less fun to tinker with.

Hell, Plasma Active even presents a viable interface that isn't the mobile
Unity that Canonical probably won't be all sunshine handholding open
contribution with already.

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claudius
I don’t think my N9 is less fun to tinker with just because it is mostly a
‘media consumption device’ and given appropriate support (i.e. SDK and all
such things), it’s not even harder to tinker with it than with the OS on my
laptop. I would still prefer a truly open system where I don’t have to
circumvent silly kernel modules (aegis, I am looking at you) every other day,
though.

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anoncow
Hardware - Canonical should get into making their own hardware. Open hardware
with unlocked bootloaders on which you could install ubuntu, ff os, android
and if ms releases images then winrt as well. Plus, they could make money this
way. The boom that windows/pc's saw in the 1990s was in part due to easily
available hardware. Why can't we have something similar but based on open
source values for mobile phones.

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meaty
A promising start is when they sell them and lots of them and people start
dropping good reviews.

With Firefox OS around and with a brand name more people recognise, I doubt
they will get anywhere.

I mean even Microsoft have had to work hard to get their stuff on the market.

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macco
I hope they will win a few carriers to support Ubunto Phone. Otherwise the
will fail badly.

