This phone made me think a lot about the future of mobile in emerging markets. I was reading a lot of great feedbacks about Mozilla with Firefox OS in Africa and some South American countries, they are very happy about the price/value of devices and the fact that these countries have a very basic (or even no) infrastructure, makes them very interesting for these systems, because you can actually build from scratch, using pretty recent technologies.

All this introduction is to try to understand the Ubuntu Phone world, I don't think it can emerge against Android or iPhone, so it should definitely compete against Mozilla in emerging markets, but it looks like is coming a little bit late. I am also curious about how developers will react to the platform, with a native or HTML5 approach, looks similar to the Microsoft strategy. Firefox was able to get devs easily because the HTML5/Javascript is an easy combo and is widely known, native development requires more efforts and has a steeper learning curve. A smartphone is 20% platform and 80% ecosystem, no apps means no users.

I am honestly interested in trying it, I did it for Firefox, writing a simple weather app for it, so I would like to do the same. At the moment, I am not sure the system will be able to compete, but happy to be proven wrong!