So I've had eleven browser tabs open all week about the Ubuntu Edge, and I finally just sat down and read the whole Indiegogo page instead of skimming it between other things. Canonical wants $32 million. Not a typo. Thirty-two million dollars, in thirty days, to build a phone that runs Ubuntu and Android at the same time and turns into a full desktop when you dock it to a monitor. Sapphire crystal screen so it basically can't scratch. 4GB of RAM at a time when most phones were shipping with 1 or 2. No compromise, Mark Shuttleworth keeps saying, which is a nice thing to say when you're not the one who has to hit the number.
They launched this thing back on the 22nd and for about the first day or two it looked unstoppable — the $600 early-bird tier (half off the eventual retail price) sold out in something like eight hours, and I remember refreshing the page that first evening watching the total climb in real time like it was a stock ticker. It's slowed down a lot since. Last I checked it's crawling past the $8 million mark, which sounds like a lot of money until you remember the goal is four times that and there are only three weeks left on the clock. Indiegogo campaigns like this are all-or-nothing too, so if they land at $25 million on August 21st, everybody gets their money back and nobody gets a phone. That's the part people keep glossing over when they write "biggest crowdfunding campaign ever" headlines.
I want to be into this. I really do. I've been running Ubuntu on a secondary laptop since around 10.04 and the idea of a phone that becomes an actual desktop the second you plug it into an HDMI cable is exactly the kind of thing that gets me typing in the middle of the night instead of sleeping. But I also backed a hardware project on Kickstarter back in early 2012 that still, as of this week, has not shipped me anything but apology emails, and that has made me a lot more careful about clicking the pledge button on a device photo and a spec sheet. A rendering is not a phone. Canonical has never built a phone. That's not a knock on them exactly, plenty of first products from serious companies turn out fine, but $830 (the price after early-bird runs out) is real money to hand over for a render.
The other thing nagging at me is that even if they hit $32 million, that's reportedly barely enough to cover one production run for the early backers, not a real retail launch. So best case, if this works, a few thousand people get a very cool, very expensive phone, and the rest of us wait and see if it ever shows up in an actual store. I don't think that's a knock on the project so much as it's just how crowdfunding hardware at this scale works right now — you're not really pre-ordering a product, you're funding a manufacturing experiment and hoping you're on the winning end of it.
Small aside because I can't help it: my Chromecast is apparently sitting in a warehouse somewhere because everything's backordered after the announcement last week. Thirty-five bucks for a little dongle that throws Netflix onto the TV is such a different bet than $830 for an unproven phone that it's almost funny to have both open in browser tabs at the same time. One is an impulse buy, the other is basically a wire transfer to a startup's hardware division.
Anyway. I'm not backing the Edge, not yet at least, but I'm going to keep the tab open and keep checking the counter, because even if it face-plants short of the goal (which, if I had to bet today, is what I think happens) it's still a more interesting thirty days than most of what's launching this month. Worth watching even if you're not reaching for your wallet.