Canonical has announced that The open-source Ubuntu operating system is coming to a smartphone near you.
The company is targeting two key audiences with the release - the enterprise market and basic, entry-level smartphones.
"We expect Ubuntu to be popular in the enterprise market, enabling customers to provision a single secure device for all PC, thin client and phone functions," Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical, said in a statement. "Ubuntu is already the most widely used Linux enterprise desktop, with customers in a wide range of sectors focused on security, cost and manageability."
Silber also envisioned the OS for basic smartphone tasks like phone, SMS, Web, and email, "where Ubuntu outperforms thanks to its native core apps and stylish presentation."
"Our mission is to make something extraordinary; something that has never existed before - one platform for all kinds of computing; your phone, tablet, desktop, and TV, and of course, the cloud, and your personal supercomputer," Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder, said in a video message (below).
Shuttleworth said Canonical has "made sure that we can use Android kernels and Android drivers, so if your hardware works with Android, it will also work with Ubuntu."
The video showed off a UI that accesses apps and other services via swipes from the left and right of the screen. It's the "first phone that uses every edge of the screen, [and] each edge has specific purposes," Shuttleworth said.
Touch the left side of the screen and favorite apps will appear in a row, top to bottom. Swipe from the right side of the screen for easy access to most used apps. Swipe from the top for a search box.
Shuttleworth said Canonical considers HTML5 to be a "first-class development environment." But he acknowledged that HTML5 has its limitations, "so we've built a native app develoment environment for the phone," he said.
"It uses QML to give you a really slick, easy development experience for touch apps that can have their engine written in C or C++ and also use Javascript for some of the UI glue that isn't performance critical," he continued.
The QML tool kit and sample application are available for download today, he said.
Shuttleworth said that top gaming companies are moving to support Ubuntu, so "you can count on having all the best games in the palm of your hand."
Canonical will be at next week's Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas and will show the Ubuntu phone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.
The move comes almost a year after Canonical unveiled Ubuntu for Android, which would launch a full desktop OS experience whenever you connected your phone to a computer screen and keyboard.
Source pcmag.
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