| Thread Previous • Date Previous • Date Next • Thread Next |
What is important to remember, is that all these devices _are_ normal computers. There is no fundamental difference between a desktop and a laptop. The laptops used to be a lot weaker, but that's no longer the case, or both are so powerful that the distinction is less important. There is also very little difference between a tablet and a laptop, except that it has a touch screen and doesn't have a physical keyboard. A phone is either a very small laptop or a very small tablet. Other than that, there's no real difference.
I think a lot of people do not fully understand how powerful phones have become. Nearly three years ago, I was able to use the full Ubuntu desktop experience on an OMAP3 device that was intended for phones and similar things. More precisely, it was the IGEPv2, which has an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, a single core, running at 720MHz and it has 512MB RAM. At the time, I still had -- and made good use of -- a desktop that was significantly less powerful! Comparable devices from 2011 are at least 3-4 times more powerful. They are now easily able to run dual-headed Full HD and Ubuntu desktop is absolutely no challenge at all. Memory consumption will be even more important, but that only helps to keep things tight in Ubuntu in general. And, of course, phones won't get _less_ memory in the future.
It should be a major goal to keep Phone, Desktop, Tablet, TV and IVI as similar as possible. The developers efforts and users experience must be reusable. Their defaults, such as installed apps, should be optimized for their primary screens, but other than that, they should be treated as normal computers and you should be able to use it as such. I overheard a conversation at a bar last weekend. Someone asked what's the point of having HDMI on a phone? The other replied that it was probably to watch videos and such. The software on my Nokia N8 is completely useless on a large screen, which makes the HDMI port rather useless in practice. I can easily attach a keyboard and mouse to it. If I had Ubuntu Phone on it, I could plug it into any TV and use it as a portable desktop. That would be a _huge_ win. It would make the hardware much more valuable, which is good for users and manufacturers.
Ubuntu has a major advantage in that our software is free and can be ported to ARM with relative ease. Microsoft cannot do that, because most of the things that makes Windows attractive, is the third-party software that they're not allowed to port. Apple, of course, is a bit schizophrenic in that they have different operating systems for different contexts. Android has nothing to compete with for desktops and laptops at all.
Ubuntu is the only real show in town. In this situation, we must lead and not follow. Ubuntu is Ubuntu, regardless of device.
Jo-Erlend Schinstad
| Thread Previous • Date Previous • Date Next • Thread Next |
