Canonical dropped their Ubuntu for phones announcement last Wednesday, January 2nd, which meant it landed right before everyone's attention got hijacked by CES this week. I've been reading through the press stuff on and off for a few days now and I keep going back and forth on whether this is actually smart or just a neat demo that never ships.
Here's the pitch, in case you missed it under the pile of curved TV headlines: you get an Ubuntu phone, and when you dock it into a monitor with a keyboard and mouse, it turns into a full Ubuntu desktop. Same device, same apps, same everything, just a different screen and a different set of inputs. Canonical's been talking about "convergence" for years on the desktop side (remember when Unity was going to unify everything?) but this is the first time they've tied it to hardware you'd actually carry in your pocket.
I like the idea a lot more than I like the timeline. Canonical's own people are saying carrier-ready phones running Ubuntu wont actually ship until 2014. Thats a long runway for something announced with this much fanfare. In the meantime what you get, starting with a developer preview aimed at existing Nexus hardware (Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, the 7 and 10 tablets), is basically a build you flash on yourself if youre the kind of person who already has a spare phone lying around for exactly this kind of thing. I do not have a spare phone lying around. Most people dont.
The interface ditches hardware buttons almost entirely in favor of edge swipes, which, fine, thats basically where the whole industry is headed anyway. Whats more interesting to me is the minimum spec bar Canonical is setting for the "full desktop when docked" trick to actually work: something like a dual core chip around 1.5GHz and enough RAM to not choke. Thats not a crazy ask in January 2013 (the Nexus 4 clears it easily) but it does mean this was never going to be a feature for cheap phones. Its a flagship-tier pitch dressed up as an everyman convergence story, and those two things dont totally match.
What I keep coming back to is that this is basically the third or fourth time someone's tried to sell "your phone is secretly your PC" as the future. Motorola did the Atrix and that laptop dock thing back in 2011 and it went nowhere, mostly because the dock cost almost as much as the phone and nobody wanted to lug it around. Palm was fiddling with similar ideas even before that. The hardware keeps getting fast enough to make the pitch technically plausible a little sooner each time, but the reason people dont actually do this has never really been about horsepower. Its that docking stations are annoying, the monitor at your desk is already attached to a real computer, and most of us arent setting up a dock at every spot we might want a bigger screen.
Still, I'll give Canonical credit for at least being upfront that this is a multi-year bet and not pretending it ships next month. Half the CES press releases this week are demoing stuff that will quietly disappear by summer anyway (I will put real money on at least one "smart fridge" from this show never making it past the prototype stage). An honest two-year roadmap is at least honest.
If youre curious enough to try flashing the developer build once its out, back up your phone first. I say this because I didnt back mine up the last time I flashed something experimental onto it, back in 2011, and I spent a genuinely annoyed Saturday afternoon rebuilding my contacts list from an old Gmail export. Learn from my mistakes instead of your own.
Worth keeping an eye on. Not worth getting your hopes up about for a while yet, though.