As a unity user for most of last year, (switched to mate now) I would also like one to have a play with, but with no info about apps i presently use, or backup if it broke, im going to just watch and wait.

It was a mistake, clearly evidenced by Apple's moves back then to push to end exclusivity as soon as possible to try and curb Android's growth.

They may have kept the margins high, but they did so at the expense of market dominance, which is something that Apple (or Steve Jobs at least) held in high esteem, given that they tried to sue anything Android related to the high heavens. All of their actions post-Android point to them being bitterly annoyed that Android was allowed to happen, so I don't agree that they weren't aiming for high market share. Less market share means less people to sell their highly marked up devices to.

I think it would be pretty certain that had Apple sold the iPhone on every carrier from the beginning, their market dominance would have been unprecedented and all encompassing, possibly equivalent to the iPod's effect on the portable music player market, i.e. a complete clean sweep and elimination of competition.

I agree with you on Ubuntu Phone though. Perhaps there's a parallel universe out there where Ubuntu Phone is a success.

Get it then. I still have a Zune HD somewhere I liked the look of it and sound quality was great. I knew it would never be a success, but I don't have to be on the winner's team just for the sake of it.

Ubuntu for phone is brand new though. IOS and Android were also pretty shite when they first came out. Give them a chance! Choice is good to have. So what if they don't grab a big market share, they may appeal to people who are security conscious and do not want to ride the "Appdroid" bandwagon and try something else.

I welcome it. The more the merrier.

@slick1two the new OSs have to grab a promising market share so that OEMs won't abandon it too quickly. You have two mature OSs out there already which are a safe choice for the potential owners, anything new is a risk. There's a peer pressure, ability to use the same apps as your friends, etc. Even MS with lots of money struggles. It's a bit like TV shows, they may have some quality, but if they do not grab viewers' attention in 5 minutes they are history.

Well, that's a sad indictment of what our attention spans have become.

The phone is now on sale but according to Twitter there are some technical issues with the website.

Wonder is it down to high demand/traffic?

Wow, they all sold out and Canonical and BQ are having another flash sale this afternoon

But what was the original stock level?

Seems to be very limited. The 2nd flash sale started at 2pm, out of curiosity I clicked into the BQ website at 2.05 and saw the "Out of Stock" message displaying.

They probably just pried the additional handsets from their coworkers' hands It's a huge risk they took, I wish them well. Maybe if every Linux fan got one, they could get this thing running.

I think Android also benefitted greatly from the monumental cock ups within Nokia and others that saw it effectively kill off Symbian (and then later Mr Elop would drive the final nail in the coffin) and allow Android to move in.

Symbian, whether using Series nn or UIQ (the touch-friendly version around since 2002 - some five years ahead of Apple) should have seen off both Android and Apple. Or certainly only allowed either to be behind.

All of the recent efforts to create a new OS, new UI and a new app ecosystem are doomed to fail because the OS is far less important today than how the phone works, and what apps and games are available. The success relies a lot on developers, who are sticking with iOS and Android.

So all the other wannabes now seem to think the solution is to be able to run Android apps. That's fine, in theory, except there are often a range of issues and I think a lot people just decide to get an Android phone in the first place.

What's more, if all these wannabes were released for emerging markets to undercut Android, it isn't working now Android phones are fighting it out in that very market place.

I don't think it's necessarily a good thing that we effectively only have two OSes, with Windows Phone still battling along (and BB OS almost certainly going to die at some point), but that's what we have.

I'm all for a new player to enter the market, but that new player has to get so many things right and will need a HUGE financial backing. But even paying developers as Microsoft (and before it, Nokia), RIM/BlackBerry and Samsung etc to create apps natively for its OS doesn't ever pay off. You can have various developer competitions and incentives, but you can't pay developers forever.

There have now been so many attempts it's almost becoming laughable. Ubuntu really isn't going to be any different. Come back and re-read this post in a few years when I'm proven correct.

How brilliant would it be if you could install the OS on hardware like the HTC One M8 or the Galaxy S5?

I dream of a day when we can install whatever OS we like on a phone just like we can with a computer.

I do think the mobile market needs the likes of Ubuntu as it has become quite stale. Look at iOS and Android updates these days. Very little real innovation happening. Canonical should be applauded for trying to take mobile (and indeed desktop) in a different direction. I love the scopes concept.

Exactly what I was saying to the missus last night. I have a pretty old now Samsung Galaxy S2. I'd love to be able to install Ubuntu on it just as I would a desktop. Maybe that idea isn't so far away.


I absolutely agree. If we want something different, it's up to us to get it when it comes along.

Still haven't found a demo as how to add apps, or even a app store.
Can you get sky sport app, iplayer, tunein etc?
How does it actually work?

The cracks were already showing in Symbian by the time the iPhone showed up in 2007. Android was still in development at that time. Symbian was too disconnected and the experiences varied by device, one particularly good example of a Symbian phone was the Sony Ericsson P800, but look just a little down the line at one of its successors, the P1, and Symbian's issues begin to show quite clearly. I'm not sure what caused it exactly, but the OS reached a stagnation point.

I guess Symbian's displacement is similar to Blackberry's, in that they didn't push hard enough on the development front because they had been leading the market for long periods of time. Unfortunately, they realised the importance of investing in ecosystem far too late.

I very much agree with the rest of your post, and it's what I've also been saying in this thread. The ecosystem has become a core part of an OS. It's the only reason Amazon's Fire OS has managed to see some success, Amazon's strength is services and they have a rich and populated ecosystem to back up their OS. Canonical does not have those resources, and if Microsoft hasn't managed to force developers to produce apps for their OS, even after all the cash they've been throwing around, Canonical doesn't really have a hope in hell I'm afraid.

I would even say that a "few years" is generous. Given that Canonical failed to gather enough funding for their previous mobile project, even after crowd-funding it, the signs aren't looking good.

Drivers would be the biggest hurdle, there would be less variety, but still somebody would have to write them for each model/group of models and OS+version.

I just realised I still have an old S2 rattling around a drawer somewhere

Ubuntu gave a new lease of life to an older laptop, no reason it can't do the same for an older phone

If you want to play with Ubuntu Touch on an S2 you can, although not everything works

There's a whole load of unofficial ports for different devices listed here, and there are official versions for a few different Nexus devices - installation instructions here. I've played with it on my old Nexus 4 a few times during the development process, and I like what they are doing with it.

Skip to 32mins for phone talk

http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/7...alling-lup-79/

Great insite, also they are already looking at the next phone release.

Some more info. http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/

Not necessarily. Linux speeds up the laptop because it's not Windows. There's no saying that Ubuntu is any lighter weight than Android.

Cracks may have been showing in Symbian but the thing is Nokia already had something else in the pipe work.

Nokia knew Symbian had reached its end of life so they were deep in working on something else.

Firstly with maemo which was the main OS for the nokia n900 a fully Linux system which any one could make apps for and there was a healthy repositories of apps, the n900 was a beast of a phone for what you could do with it It had touch screen with a stylus but the apps and what you could do with it showed nokia at its best

secondly elop made the bigest mistake in killing meego a team up between nokia and Intel to make a smart phone os (just like android) but using linux most in the uk would not seen meego as nokia decided to not release the n9 in the uk it was about the same time as the lumias were hitting the market in the uk

the day the n9 went on sale elop killed meego and jumped into bed with M$ and that was the bitter end of once a great force in the mobile sector


but with the death of meego so sprang the mer project and later sailfish and the open mobile os is still alive

nokia made to many mistakes i think if they stayed with meego they would have made the mark android has now

Maemo had promise, and I liked the Nokia Internet Tablet (looking back, it's quite odd to think how that was designed and marketed) but I think it was silly to think of Symbian as dead and to move on to something else, with or without a valuable app ecosystem.

I do think UIQ should have been done better (UIQ3 was, frankly, s**t) as it took Nokia ages to make Series 60 touch friendly. Sony Ericsson did so well with the P800/900 and others, but then messed up as time went on. Was it SE or UIQ? Who knows, but that could have become what Android was.

S60 5th Edition or whatever the first touch version was (too late to look stuff up) was a mess. And Nokia loved back then to equip phones with the bare minimum hardware, so too little RAM, a slow CPU and so on.

It still confuses me to this day how Nokia managed its different lines as if nobody talked to each other. We even had E-Series and Nseries. (Note the lack of hypen). Yes, we were told by staff and PR reps that one was written one way and the other another way!

I guess I don't need to mention the joke that was Ovi either. I was at the launch event by the Thames and remember them saying they didn't know what it was really about, but that it would evolve and find itself in time. Well it did find itself - scrapped!

Once Elop came, the nail was in the coffin. I was editor of What Mobile then and said quite confidently that he'd run things down until Nokia was a shadow of its former self, then let Microsoft buy it. That's exactly what happened, even though some people were convinced it wouldn't.

Elop made stupid claims that it couldn't adopt Android because it wouldn't have been able to compete with Samsung. Total nonsense, as if Nokia had adopted Android early on, it would have probably stopped Samsung ever getting as big as it it did. Nokia had an incredible reputation, customer loyalty and carriers/distributors that would do business all day long with the company.

Nokia could have dabbled with multiple OSes (just as Samsung used to do, as well as Motorola and others) too, so by all means go with Windows Phone, but keep Symbian, Maemo/Meego and Android.. then see what works and go from there.

Anyway, back to Ubuntu.....!

I would say it could be a good deal lighter when you take all the bloat that mobile carriers force on us.