Ubuntu Touch Developers Aim for Daily Phone Usability Before June 83
colinneagle writes with the latest Ubuntu Touch news. From the article: "The team behind Ubuntu Touch (aka 'Ubuntu for Phones') have committed to pushing forward to a ready-to-use version of the OS, one that the group will use to 'eat their own dog food,' by the end of May. What that means: Over the next few weeks, the team behind Ubuntu Touch is going to be attempting to implement enough functionality to make it possible to use Ubuntu on your phone (such as the Nexus 4) on a day-to-day basis. At which point their development team will be doing exactly that."
The developers are aiming just to have basic functionality working by the end of the month: calls, sms, data over wifi and cellular, a working address book, and preservation of user data across OS flashes.
Re:Android (Score:4, Informative)
The thing that keeps me from being excited about even the idea of this is that there *is* an open Linux-based environment for phones, and it's called Android.
There are many good things about Android, and I enjoy it and would probably not replace it with Ubuntu if it were offered to me. However, more competition is still a good thing.
There are plenty of places Ubuntu could add value.
And this is one of them. One benefit would be having a more standard kernel on your phone, which would permit the use of more software. Today, phones are more powerful than machines I was using as a desktop not very long ago. I would like to run desktop software sometimes.
Whatever they do, reinventing the foundations of Android isn't where the juice is.
They aren't! The foundations are the same, the Linux kernel! And they're doing less reinvention of that than has Android!