News Ubuntu Edge revealed as crowdfunded Formula 1 of phones

I smell a Bit-Tech giveaway.......... . . . . .


In all seriousness, these are the times I wish I had $600 spare. At all.

 

I'm actually interested in a smartphone not using Andfroid, Windows Phone or iOS. I hate these because of the companies spying on their users delivering all the data to the various agencies.

On another note, this Ubuntu-phone is more a small fully fledged PC running Ubuntu like you do on a desktop, and you can connect mouse and keyboard via Bluetooth to use it as an office-PC.
In that light the price isn't that high imho, as we're speaking of the smallest PC ever built here. 4GB RAM and 128GB storage is pretty sweet too, as this would be the first smartphone capable of storing my whole music-library and having some room left afterwards for some apps/software, whatever.

I'm buying a Jolla at the end of the year tho, as it'll run MeeGo and has a user-changeable battery.

 

You and me both!

 

That was kind of my reaction. The sloping top looks très Surface, but trying to press the power button on it without simultaneously pushing the phone forward and effectively out of your grip is going to be tricky. Expect a lot of accidentally dropped units. That sapphire glass may come in handy...

 

I spy vaporware....

 

More like there are no high resolution high quality 4.5" high PPI displays. PenTile or SLCD, neither is without compromises at 1080p.

Did you say the same to Surface design ? And to be honest, i seen worse - *cough*nearly all Samsung or Acer phones*cough*.

Goal is $32 million and i am pretty sure software side of things is not calculated in this goal - there are already ROM's for various Nexus devices :
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install#Supported_devices_and_codenames

 

Good looking phone though!

 

Looks good, even if it is a flop its the most innovation I have seen in mobile phones for years...

Well done for thinking outside the box Canonical : )

 

How long before apple sue them

 

Reading there page more is also intresting, 3 mil total dev costs seems small. No cost of material estimates, does not say if they have contracts in place to build these 5k phones.

Using a nexus rom on a phone like this would be backwords, its more mini pc than smartphone. And no one is paying that sort of cash for a nexus look alike you can buy the nexus from google store for alot cheaper.

Also no mension on carrier deals if its 4g in the uk at least there's 1 phone company, there's also 2 different bandwidths for 4g currently are they supplying to both as if not you could find it works for one and not for another.

Way to many questions without answers for my liking.

 

No, because with a Surface tablet pushing the power button on the sloping top does not push the whole thing out of your hands.

 

Please link me where you can find this $3 million total development cost, all i can see is $32 million goal and $3.3 million money accumulated so far.

5k phones ? $32 million divided by $830 = 38.5k units, considering the $600 offer and $3 million already accumulated it will be around a 45k unit run.

My point was that you can try Ubuntu Touch right now, on the Nexus phone, not other way around. So if you got let's say a Galaxy Nexus after you upgraded to Nexus 4/HTC One/Galaxy S4, then you can put Ubuntu Touch on it.

They don't mentoin carrier deals because this is a limited, testing run without carrier involvement. LTE - i see "and the dual-LTE chip will get you online with 4G even when you’re travelling abroad" line on the indiegogo page, so i would say it will support it. Especially considering it will be launched in 2014, every phone SoC will have LTE at that time.

@Nexxo: it's not like they are the only ones with the power buttons on top, and i don't push my HTC One of my hand just because the power button is on top.

 

They have minimum goals faug. 5k phones is that minimum says so on backing page.

Difficult to confirm what duel LTE chip is as no such chip appears that I have found, does that mean they are making there own.

There's also this the latest quad core chip. Well it can only be nvidia or Qualcomm supplied because Samsung make there own and so does Apple. Nvidia is tegra 4. Unless they making there own if so do they own the arm 7 licence.

I quiet like the design personally would be something I'd consider buying but never backing and I'd imagine alot are in this boat.

Too many big companies have failed to make a smartphone with much bigger budgets than this has.

 

@rollo: That was for the special price limitation (=only max cca 3000 phones only on 1st day for $600), not a minimum goal.

There is no $3M variant, it's either $32M or more or nothing.

LTE - again, you are thinking in context of now. Think in context of what will be on market sometime around Q1/2014 when these phones will be made, if not delayed.

SoC - Samsung sells Exynos to others too, they are in Meizu phones or Hyundai tablets. Then of course there is Qualcomm, Tegra, Rockchip.

You need to think abuut this phone as a Google Glass-like product - small initial run, to show that there is a interest in the platform to the operators, who will then later outsource their own versions to various manufacturers - like Orange has their suff made by ZTE mostly.

 

Sorry this is a 2011 opinion. Have you used a HTC One? 4.7" 1080p LCD and many of the 5" LCD devices on the market produce fantastic results, even if it's 'only' LTPS rather than leading (but super expensive) IGZO.

Again, regarding the S4 and Note this is not true. Previous designs maybe and Acer and Lenovo phones I will certainly agree with. Surface is a tablet. Tablet and phone user models are different. If they were making a 10" Ubuntu tablet I'd give it a more interest - at least then they could fit in a Baytrail chip, or, have more freedom with application processors.

Fair enough, but what about all the expert designers and engineers. The first products of any company to market should take at least 18 months. Only with experience can you drop that to 6 and make a quality product. I've been through several development cycles. Good luck to them - I really hope they don't disappoint - but I will be surprised if they pull it off. At lot of the spec looks like just "say the most to get all the monies" and I'd be very wary of that.

faugusztin - every phone won't have LTE in 2014 because MOST markets still don't have LTE, and those that are rolling it out will be on the up-ramp. Emerging markets are.. sometime second half of this decade. Qualicomm is still the only serious chipset maker with an LTE part with the power/size/ceritifcation process requirements to fit phones. Nvidia, Intel and Mediatek are due to launch LTE chips in 2014, but when they are already all delayed from this year and whether they are ready and certified and their basebands/software are stable in time, who knows? They would need to be sampling now in order to make it inside this phone - if they plan to launch Q1'14 their SR (early sample run) stage will Sept-Oct, with ER (engineering run) Nov-Dec to knock out hardware bugs and test software more seriously.

 

@HTC One: i have one for 2 months.
@Samsung: we disagree on this one, design of Samsung devices is simply bad - including Galaxy Nexus or Omnia 7 i own, even more for S3/S4 or ATIV S.

We will see how will it go, at worst they will delay it like Pebble.

 

Most likely chip is Qualcomm snapdragon 800. Pretty much what bindi said is accurate in the world of phones.

The iphone 6 and next gen Samsung are likely already in testing for next year q3 launches.

 

The top of your HTC One does not slope back at a good thirty degrees. The Ubuntu Edge phone does. So you are pushing down on a surface that is tilted back, and the direction of some of that force is angled forwards. You are basically pushing the device forwards out of the grip of your fingertips.

 

I like the idea of the ubuntu phone and how they approach convergence, so I contributed. Also I got in on the second round of lower prices. Bit of a gamble but what's life without risk.