It has been a long time since Canonical announced the Ubuntu Edge smartphone campaign on Indiegogo. It raised an incredible $12 million dollars, but — equally incredible — it still fell around $20 million short of its lofty goals. However, that didn’t derail Canonical’s agenda of bringing its desktop Linux OS, Ubuntu, to mobile devices. In fact, judging by this video demo, the project is still going strong.
A prevalent theory regarding the Edge campaign suggests that Canonical’s lofty $32 million funding goal meant that the company never actually thought the campaign would succeed. Instead, it just launched the campaign to get the word out for mobile Ubuntu, as well as drum up some good press; if the campaign goal was magically met, then there would be no harm in using all that money to build some phones. If the goal really was simply to get the word out, then it definitely worked — we’re all still talking about Ubuntu on mobile devices to this day (whenever there’s news, at least). The operating system’s transition to mobile is shaping up to look quite good.
Back in February, we learned that Canonical had finally found hardware manufacturers to make Ubuntu-specific phones — Meizu in China, and BQ in Europe. Now, the above video is demonstrating Ubuntu on one of Meizu’s phones, the MX3. The Meizu MX3 appears to be your standard slightly-above-midrange smartphone: a Cortex-A15 big.LITTLE SoC, 2GB of RAM, and a PowerVR SGX544 graphics chip.
The video doesn’t get too deep into the OS, but just watching the finger flick through menus gives you a good sense of how the phone runs. It’s difficult not to notice that the on-screen keyboard isn’t used in a Swype fashion, so fans of Android keyboards might be a little wary of that. The image gallery is also quite jarring at first, throwing pictures into different-sized bubbles all over the place. When you see the demonstrator navigate it, though, it makes perfect sense — but it doesn’t make it any less messy. The phone also sports a couple of iOS Command Center-style bars — a bottom pop-up, and a desktop Unity-style bar on the left that also pops out.
For the most part, the OS looks smooth. If the mobile Ubuntu venture is a success, then we might see a stateside release sometime in the future.
There’s still a lot of pieces missing in the tale of Amazon’s
smartphone, but one big way the company could set themselves apart from
the pack would be to leverage AT&T’s Sponsored Data service with
their Prime subscription service to create a cheaper monthly phone bill.
Amazon has apparently been working on a smartphone behind the scenes
for a couple of years now, but there’s never been any real chatter about
it until recently. What we think we know now is that Amazon will launch
a phone later this year with some unique camera and 3D tech in order to create a wildly new experience on top of their version of Android.
Whether or not Amazon’s AppStore is capable of holding its own
against the Google Play Store and iOS in the smartphone world is
debatable, but if Amazon heads toward their own hardware there’s a good
chance they will be marginally successful.
The one big way that they could give themselves an advantage is to
approach the mobile experience from a new angle, by approaching the
smartphone as though they are aware that you spend a monthly sum on data
and trying to help out with that. According to BGR, who broke the
Amazon story in the first place, the Amazon phone could wind up being an
AT&T exclusive by way of their Sponsored Data program.
This service allows Amazon to foot the bill for certain amounts of
data that you would use every month. In essence, they could do anything
from making all of your time on Amazon services cost you nothing in
data, to making it so your monthly bill is significantly cheaper than it
should be.
For Amazon users who
are fans of the Prime services, especially the Instant Video streaming
service, this could be a huge deal. To be able to offer a solution where
streaming Instant Video was not only included with your phone, but
essentially free against your monthly data allotment would be incredibly
powerful leverage.
We’ve still got no real idea when this phone is coming to market or
what it will actually look like when we go to use it, but every time we
hear more about it there’s another reason to be cautiously optimistic
about its existence.
It looks like the feature filled Moto X and the insanely cheap Moto G
will not be the only smartphones being offered by Motorola soon.
Motorola has sent out
invites to an event in London on May 13th to unveil another budget
focused smartphone. Recent leaks have pointed to the Moto E, a 4.3-inch
phone with a 720p display, a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, and 1GB of RAM.
If this phone is anything like the Moto G, users can expect replaceable
backs and customization options for an inexpensive but personalized
experience.
Rumors place this phone at $100 which would make it one of the least
expensive phones on the market, but Motorola also describes the phone as
“made to last” which could suggest ruggedization of some kind.
The Moto E isn’t the only phone Motorola is expected to announce this
year. The Moto X+1 is expected to be available later this year as a
successor to the first phone Motorola made as a Google company. This
announcement comes on the heels of Motorola announcing a sale on the Moto X
through their online retailer. While it’s unlikely the X+1 would be
announced on the 13th, Motorola’s invitation is clearly aimed at price
as the driving factor for people to be interested in the phone.
Budget markets were clearly the right place for Motorola to attack with the Moto G,
but the decision to go even lower with the Moto E shows that they had
more success in this area than they originally expected to. Motorola is
going to keep pushing new devices into markets plagued by companies
releasing so-called Mini variants of their existing flagships, which is
only good news for consumers who don’t care about which phone is the
best.
Google is currently facing a lawsuit that many have suggested would
be on the way for over a year now. The seemingly forced union of Google
Mobile Services and Android has spawned questions about the
anti-competitive nature of these policies.
The open nature of Android, and more specifically Google, is going to be called into question in a court of law soon. We know that Google asks a great deal of manufacturers if they want access to Google Apps and Google Play Services, including specific placement of Google products on the homescreen and recently even a “powered by Android” logo in the boot screen. The lawsuit being brought against Google accuses the company of wielding these agreements to be anti-competitive, and is seeking an injunction against the company to stop this from happening.
It has been said time and time again that if you want to use Google’s apps on your version of Android, you need to follow Google’s rules. The Google Mobile Services agreement is largely a secret between Android OEMs and Google, but over the last year several details surrounding the agreement have leaked out and caused an increasing amount of commotion surrounding just how “open” Android really is.
While there are no smartphones running Android that are both free of Google Mobile Services and actually selling in any significant volume, the same can not be said for tablets. Amazon in particular has carved a niche out for themselves with the Kindle Fire and Fire TV devices, both of which run Android and are completely free of Google apps and services. If the rumors of an Amazon smartphone are true, the company will have Google free versions of Android in three key markets, serving as a prime example that you can have Android without Google and be successful.
At the end of the day the question seems to be whether or not it is anti-competitve that Google forces the rest of their apps on the manufacturer when they want to provide the Google Play Store on their phones. Trying to sell a smartphone without access to some kind of giant app catalog isn’t going to be successful anymore, which is one of the big reasons that Windows Phone has been so slow to reclaim marketshare and Samsung’s Tizen has been laughed out of several carriers around the world before even being launched.
An Android phone without the Google Play Store is viewed by many as barely worth even looking at, which is the basis for this lawsuit in the first place. It’s not that you can’t make Android work without Google’s services, it’s that Google seems to have worked hard to make sure no one would actually want to.
The open nature of Android, and more specifically Google, is going to be called into question in a court of law soon. We know that Google asks a great deal of manufacturers if they want access to Google Apps and Google Play Services, including specific placement of Google products on the homescreen and recently even a “powered by Android” logo in the boot screen. The lawsuit being brought against Google accuses the company of wielding these agreements to be anti-competitive, and is seeking an injunction against the company to stop this from happening.
It has been said time and time again that if you want to use Google’s apps on your version of Android, you need to follow Google’s rules. The Google Mobile Services agreement is largely a secret between Android OEMs and Google, but over the last year several details surrounding the agreement have leaked out and caused an increasing amount of commotion surrounding just how “open” Android really is.
While there are no smartphones running Android that are both free of Google Mobile Services and actually selling in any significant volume, the same can not be said for tablets. Amazon in particular has carved a niche out for themselves with the Kindle Fire and Fire TV devices, both of which run Android and are completely free of Google apps and services. If the rumors of an Amazon smartphone are true, the company will have Google free versions of Android in three key markets, serving as a prime example that you can have Android without Google and be successful.
At the end of the day the question seems to be whether or not it is anti-competitve that Google forces the rest of their apps on the manufacturer when they want to provide the Google Play Store on their phones. Trying to sell a smartphone without access to some kind of giant app catalog isn’t going to be successful anymore, which is one of the big reasons that Windows Phone has been so slow to reclaim marketshare and Samsung’s Tizen has been laughed out of several carriers around the world before even being launched.
An Android phone without the Google Play Store is viewed by many as barely worth even looking at, which is the basis for this lawsuit in the first place. It’s not that you can’t make Android work without Google’s services, it’s that Google seems to have worked hard to make sure no one would actually want to.
