How the Ubuntu phone OS and hardware are shaping up

How the Ubuntu phone OS and hardware are shaping up

“One binary for the whole ecosystem”

 In Las Vegas where, like last year, Canonical was trying to gain the attention of more hardware manufacturers for its new software. While Shuttleworth admits that it currently has no carrier commitments, he is confident in Canonical’s electronics partners:  “We have a couple of silicon partners, the kind that make chips for mobile phones, and they’re looking at doing optimisation for their chipsets. All these chips are slightly different, and we couldn’t possibly optimise them ourselves. Out of our two main silicon partners, one has made a substantial commitment to us and in return they will be our reference developer. The exact ins and outs will all be  announced after we’ve got everything sorted,  but they’re great partners.” How the Ubuntu phone OS and hardware are shaping up Shuttleworth went on to explain that the various handset manufacturers are confident about buying from these partners. 

                             They can supply the industry in large volumes, and the work they do helps reduce the all-important ‘time to market’. It also helps on the technical side with working with the specific carriers in the long term. When pressed for a release window on this time-to-market plan, he told us Q1 2014. Since then, reports have come out that we may even see the phone before the year is out. “The main problem for that is the carrier getting  on board, not the engineering,” Shuttleworth  explained. “There’s a lot of work to be done, but it’s starting to go ahead now that we’ve opened it up. Right now we’re just gauging the reaction of the Ubuntu community, and we’ll be releasing images for a couple of different phones in due course. 

                               Things will really start to  accelerate now.” The image will be available for a number of Android phones, although Shuttleworth would not reveal exactly which ones outside of the Galaxy Nexus it was originally demoed on.  “We’ve ported it onto a variety of other Android  devices, and it’s pretty quick to do so. There’s  always the temptation to get it on the hottest, latest, fastest, sexiest thing, but right now the Galaxy Nexus is important to us. The hardware spec in that is pretty much where we’re targeting for next year, which makes it great for us and our community, so we can use it as our development platform.

                              It’s too easy though to convince yourself you’ve got a great platform that runs like blazes on the world’s fastest phone, and we don’t want to do that.” As reported previously, Canonical is currently looking at a fairly specifi c hardware type for current builds of the phone. Like the Galaxy Nexus, multi-core Cortex-A9 chips are favoured, with four cores getting you the  complete experience with desktop mode, and  dual-core getting you the phone OS only. It’s thanks to the work that Canonical has done over the past four years getting Ubuntu working on ARM chipsets that the phone versions run well on these platforms. 

                               Shuttleworth told us that it’s resulted in a lot of optimisation and that their performance is comparable to Linaro. The Unity interface has also been tweaked a fair bit for the phone, more so than even Ubuntu TV. However, that was always part of the plan according to Shuttleworth: “A lot of the design in Unity took shape because we designed the phone, the tablet, the TV and the desktop all at the same time. It’s been quite tough; we faced a lot of questions on why things are the way they are, but we did a lot of careful balancing across the full range of panels, to make something that is coherent.