Ubuntu Off to a Promising Start on Smartphones
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
5 years ago your smartphone would have choked on a GUI transition with transparency. In 5 years, We will probably have ARM v9 with 10 hour battery life easily running these workloads.
When the first desktop in your pocket hits the market in force, think of it like the first iphone, tablet, or netbook. Primitive and slow, but a precursor of things to come when efficiency ramps up.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
for a list of supported devices.
Thinking about it now, since their plan is to have the same software run on the laptop and phone, you can do it just by installing Ubuntu (or really, Ubuntu in 1-2 future versions). The only thing you won't get to see is what it looks like on small screen sizes - for that you'll need some sort of emulator. I don't know much about virtualization - is there a host program that can dynamically change screen sizes, or pretend that you just plugged into a dock? If so, that should do it.
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.
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.