Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Sat Jan 19 12:03:52 CST 2013
Ubuntu has developed its own phone OS but whether it is just a side project is yet to be seen as carriers have said they will support it and as long as they are allowed room to place some of their own advertisements. Right now the phone is supported on the Galaxy Nexus but that support will most likely be extended to some Nokia phones as it appears that Nokia is keeping its options open by developing support for Android, Ubuntu and Windows. Game companies like EA, Valve Software and Unity Technologies are already building and porting their apps to this device. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cpWHJDLsqTU#! The Ubuntu phone: http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone As well as being able to design apps in HTML5/CSS3?JavaScript (Note: the development kit provides a full JavaScript to assembler compiler for greater performance), the phone's core development language and IDE are as follows Qt Creator IDE for creating cross-platform applications developed in C/C++ and QML http://qt.digia.com/ The QML language: http://developer.ubuntu.com/resources/programming-languages/qml/ and samples: http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.7/qdeclarativeintroduction.html or download the whole mobile kit from: http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile/ OS hardware requirements: According to Canonical a phone needs the following requirements:[6] 1. Dual-core 1 GHz CPU, 1Ghz Cortex A9, Quad-core A9 or Intel Atom. 2. Video acceleration: shared kernel driver with associated X driver; OpenGL, ES/EGL 3. Storage: 2 GB for OS disk image. (the OS can support up to 32GB of RAM and can run as a desktop) 4. Also supports ports like HDMI: video-out with secondary framebuffer device and USB host mode 5. Core OS will run in 512 MB RAM One comparison with the Windows Phone OS states it requires 2 GB of RAM, runs at less than a third of the speed of the Ubuntu phone and has no native Game company support, as of yet. You can just bring your Ubuntu phone home plug it into your PC/Laptop/Tablet and have access the full Ubuntu desktop...within the proper environment, they claim it can be used as a server and extend its services with full terminal services across the network...a full multi-user phone OS. In addition, according to Canonical it is the most secure OS ever built and now can provide banking services. It is also fully voice activated. Whether this will all be enough for a company with little resources, no sales budget to speak off, no signed carriers and opponents like Microsoft, Apple and Google, is yet to be seen but they are off to a bold and promising start...but check it out Jim