Ubuntu For Phone

Ubuntu For Phone

Ubuntu now fits your phone; it is also a full PC. Six major mobile operating systems vied for users: BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS, iPhone, and Android. There was competition, lots of it, but also complexity, uneven customer support, limited handset availability, and stunted app and OS development. But now, the Android and iPhone is still dominating the worldwide smartphone users. Microsoft's Windows Phone OS and Palm's WebOS crumpled, and development on RIM's BlackBerry OS stuttered. Nokia still technically supports Symbian, but threw its weight behind Microsoft's Windows Phone reboot.

One thing we can glean from Tizen, Ubuntu, and Firefox is an emphasis on open-source code flexibility, and a reliance on HTML5 Web standards. Each leans on Web protocols that cross-cut device brands and proprietary code to store all data in the cloud, even while offline. If there's a chance for a new OS breakthrough to take center stage the way that iOS and Android did, both RIM and Windows Phone will first have to fail and dry up just like WebOS. We'll find out how they do soon enough.

Ubuntu Phone Overview

Your phone is more immersive, the screen is less cluttered, and you flow naturally from app to app with edge magic. The phone becomes a full PC and thin client when docked. Ubuntu delivers a magical phone that is faster to run, faster to use and fits perfectly into the Ubuntu family.

Ubuntu Phone Design

Ubuntu For Phone

Designed to make all your phone content easier to access and your apps more immersive every edge has a specific purpose, making all your apps, content and controls instantly accessible, without navigating back to the home screen every time. And the Ubuntu phone fits perfectly into the wider family of Ubuntu interfaces, alongside the PC and TV. It's a uniquely, beautifully converged experience.

Ubuntu uses simple natural swiping gestures from the edges of the screen to make it easier than ever to access your content and switch between apps. Every edge of the phone is used, letting you move faster between apps, settings, and content.

Apps

A short swipe from the left edge of the screen is all it takes to reveal your favourite apps. Theres room for everything you use daily, available instantly from the welcome screen or any application. Ubuntu lets you switch faster between running and favourite apps than any other phone.

Page either left or right from the home screen to see the content you use most. A full left-to-right swipe reveals a screen showing all your open apps, while a swipe from the right brings you instantly to the last app you were using. Switching between running applications has never been quicker or easier.

A swipe from the right edge takes you back to the last app you were using; another swipe takes you back to the app you used before that. Its natural to keep many apps open at once, which is why Ubuntu was designed for multi-tasking. No other smartphone lets you switch between applications this quickly.

Swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone reveals app controls. You can hide or reveal them instantly, which mean they dont take up room on the screen, leaving you free to focus on the stuff
that matters. Immerse yourself in your photos, web pages, music, messages, and apps.

World of apps

Ubuntu For Phone

Web applications sit alongside native apps on Ubuntu. They get their own icons and the same access to system notifications. So apps like Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, Gmail and Spotify are all available and thanks to Ubuntus web app APIs, its easy for web developers to install their
sites as full applications.

But Ubuntu isnt limited to HTML5. Native apps are blazingly fast, taking advantage of the full capabilities of the phones processor and graphics hardware. And a mobile SDK does most of the work to give you that gorgeous, distinctive Ubuntu look and feel.

Run local Ubuntu apps and remote Windows apps on a secure docked phone the new thin client of choice. Your Ubuntu phone can be managed with standard enterprise Ubuntu management tools that also handle servers, cloud infrastructure, and desktops. Secure your infrastructure using Ubuntus browser and email client, delivering your legacy Office apps from your data centre.

Just tell your phone what youre looking for and watch the results come in. If its a person, youll see data from your email and phone contacts alongside Facebook friends and followers on Twitter. Looking for music? Ubuntu doesnt just search your phone. It also searches online retailers including Amazon and the Ubuntu One Music Store, putting the whole world of music at your fingertips, alongside your personal collection.

Ubuntu reflects you with personalised graphics that adorn the phones welcome screen. Designed by artists who specialise in creating beautiful visualisations of complex data, the welcome screen evolves as you use the phone to be unique and completely personal. This isnt a lock screen, its a sign saying: come in. A signature flourishes for Ubuntu and for you.

Ubuntu reinvents the inbox, giving you quicker access to all your emails, texts, calls and social media posts. See every message as it comes in and reply in an instant; just swipe down from the top when a new one arrives and respond directly to Facebook, Twitter, email, SMS and good old-fashioned telephone calls.

Ubuntu For Phone

The Gallery makes it easier than ever to organise, find and share your photos. Every shot is instantly uploaded to your Ubuntu One personal cloud account, making it available on all your devices including those running iOS, Android and Windows.

Ubuntu includes native applications covering all the essentials you expect in a phone: telephony and voicemail, SMS and MMS, email, web browsing, photography, music and video.

Click here for Ubuntu For Android

Ubuntu Phone Operators And OEMs

In the needs of network operators OEMs and ODMs in mind in bringing Ubuntu to the phone. It offers great performance on handsets with a low bill of materials, while opening up new opportunities for phone and PC convergence at the top end of the market. And its amazing user experience can be tailored to your brand, integrating your custom services, content, and apps.

Ubuntu provides a fast and beautiful experience, even on inexpensive hardware. It doesnt have the overhead of a Java virtual machine, so all core applications run at full native speeds with a small memory footprint. That gives the UI a luxurious, responsive feel without the requirement of premium hardware components.

And on the high end, Ubuntu paves the way for a new category of superphones, with a full PC desktop accessible just by docking the device to a monitor and keyboard. A truly handheld PC is the future of personal computing.

High-end smartphones have a brain as powerful as ultra-light laptops. Ubuntu uniquely enables a new category of convergence device phones that dock to become full PCs and thin clients enabling enterprise IT departments to replace phones, thin clients and laptops with a single secure corporate device.

Operators targeting the enterprise market with LTE can now deliver a full laptop/phone solution, with Windows apps delivered over LTE from the corporate data center. And operators in emerging markets can deliver desktop applications to the converged device over LTE as a premium data service.

Operators have room to enhance Ubuntu with their own services, content, apps and branding without breaking compatibility with the broader Ubuntu app ecosystem. Canonical engages with OEMs and operators to enable them to ship phones with custom capabilities, or offer exclusive items for their audience.

Content can be surfaced in the home screen and search, apps can be pre-installed and there are ample opportunities for branding the device. With an extensible cloud framework on every Ubuntu device, you can deliver custom services to your audience that fit neatly into a global cloud ecosystem.

Ubuntu is already used in over 70 countries and has been translated into over 40 languages. With 20 million desktop users around the world, it is both an established platform and an established global brand.

Ubuntu Phone App Eco System

Ubuntu For Phone

Ubuntu is the worlds favourite Linux distribution. In fact, thousands of web and mobile developers already use it every day, so its natural to expect those apps to make their way to Ubuntu.

As well as providing a fast, uncluttered experience on the phone, a great Ubuntu app whether web or native can support the traditional PC desktop right alongside the handset.

Web apps are first class citizens on Ubuntu, with APIs that provide deep integration into the interface. HTML5 apps written for other platforms can be adapted to Ubuntu with ease, and were targeting standard cross-platform web app development frameworks like PhoneGap to make Ubuntu just work for apps that use them.

Our unique web app system lets you quickly adapt any web property for installation as an app on the phone, running independently of the browser, with its own icon and access to system services. This means that all the big names will be available to Ubuntu phone users at launch.

But Ubuntu isnt limited to HTML5. For rich applications with gorgeous movement and transitions, and graphics-heavy games, Ubuntu provides an amazing native developer environment. It uses QML to give you a really slick, easy development experience for native apps with engines in C or C++, and JavaScript for UI glue that isnt performance critical. We also give you full native OpenGL, which the top games companies are using to make incredible games. Thats why developers like EA, Valve Software, and Unity Technologies are committing to Ubuntu right now.

The QML toolkit and sample application are available for download today, so theres no better time to get started.

Ubuntu Software Centre has been a part of Ubuntu for years, and well extend it to deliver phone apps too.

Already established as the most popular way to find new software on the Ubuntu desktop, it enables Ubuntu users to download and install applications in seconds. And heres the really amazing thing. With the arrival of the Ubuntu SDK, apps can be written to work on all Ubuntu form-factors: its the same Ubuntu OS on the desktop and on the phone, so a single native application can work on both. Which means you re-use most of the app when you add support for a new form-factor.

The Ubuntu One personal cloud service provides every Ubuntu user with free storage space and the option to buy more for music and photos. But for developers, Ubuntu One offers much more. The U1DB cloud-syncing database provides APIs to sync any kind of data to the cloud.

If youre a mobile operator and youd like a fast way to develop cloud-based services for your users, Ubuntu One enables you to develop integrated, differentiating services, without the need to maintain your own infrastructure. Among its features is an integrated identity management service, enabling you to manage identity, payments and service activation securely.

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