So Mobile World Congress wrapped up in Barcelona a couple days ago and my Twitter feed has been an absolute firehose of phone announcements I mostly don't care about. New Lumia, new Xperia, seventeen variations on "here's our flagship, its got a slightly bigger screen now." Fine. Whatever. The thing that actually got me off the couch this weekend was Canonical's Ubuntu Touch developer preview, which they pushed out last Thursday, and which I've now had installed on my old Galaxy Nexus for about 40 hours.
Quick backstory for anyone who missed it: Canonical (the Ubuntu people) have been talking since January about putting real Ubuntu on phones, not some stripped-down Android skin thing, an actual convergent OS that's supposed to eventually run the same on your phone and your desktop. The developer preview only works on a handful of Nexus devices right now — Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10 — and I happened to have a Galaxy Nexus sitting in a drawer because I upgraded to a Nexus 4 back in December. So instead of it just gathering dust I figured Id wipe it and see what all the fuss was about.
Getting it on there
The install process is not for your grandmother. You need the Android SDK tools already set up, fastboot working, and you basically download their image and flash it the same way youd flash a custom ROM. I've done this enough times with CyanogenMod that it wasnt a big deal, maybe 20 minutes total including the time I spent swearing at a USB cable that turned out to be a charge-only cable and not a data cable. (Why do I still own three of those. Why does every drawer in my apartment have at least one useless USB cable in it.)
Once it boots youre greeted with this dark, kind of moody lock screen and a swipe-based navigation system thats clearly aimed at getting rid of hardware buttons entirely. Swipe from the left edge for an app launcher, swipe from the right to cycle through recent apps, swipe down from the top for settings, swipe up from the bottom for contextual menus depending on what app youre in. Its a lot of edges to remember at first. I kept accidentally opening the app switcher when I meant to go home for the first hour or so.
The actual experience
Heres the honest part: this is not a phone you could hand to a normal person right now, and Canonical isnt pretending otherwise, this is a developer preview after all. Theres no phone dialer that actually places calls yet on my build. No camera app. The browser is there and its fine, actually kind of snappy, but half the apps that show up in the launcher are placeholder icons that do nothing when you tap them. I tried for about ten minutes to get the messaging app to do anything useful and gave up.
What I will say is the scrolling and animations feel genuinely smooth, smoother honestly than my Nexus 4 running stock Android at the time, which surprised me given this is supposedly early software. And I like the visual language a lot more than Id expected, it's got this flat, typographic thing going on that reminds me more of the old Windows Phone tiles than anything Android has done, minus the tiles.
I keep seeing people lump this in with Firefox OS, which also had phones on the show floor in Barcelona this week from ZTE and Alcatel, and I get why, theyre both "new mobile OS trying to break the duopoly" stories. But they feel like theyre solving different problems to me. Firefox OS is chasing cheap prepaid phones in markets where a $400 iPhone isnt happening. Ubuntu Touch is chasing this weird ambitious idea where your phone becomes your desktop when you dock it. Neither one is going to dent iOS or Android market share this year, or probably ever honestly, but Id rather live in a world where people are still trying weird stuff like this than one where every phone just runs the same two operating systems forever.
Anyway. My Galaxy Nexus is back to being a device I own but cant actually use for calls, so it goes back in the drawer next to the useless cables. If Canonical pushes an update that gets basic phone functionality working Ill probably put it back on and report back. Until then its a very pretty, very smooth brick.