Ubuntu Phone Coming Soon, but Not to U.S.
The phone won’t be directly available in the United States, and there are no immediate plans to make it available there. The new Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition bears little resemblance to the previous Ubuntu Edge. The Ubuntu Edge was a proposed “high concept” smartphone announced by U.K.-based Canonical Ltd. in 2013. Canonical, developer of the Ubuntu OS, was seeking to crowdfund a production run of around 40,000 units through Indiegogo. However, the company did not reach its goal and the phone was never manufactured.
So the Aquaris E4.5 represents the first chance to buy a phone running the Ubuntu operating system. The details of the first sale will be announced Tuesday via Ubuntu’s Twitter account, Google Plus and Facebook pages and BQ’s Twitter account.
The Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition has a 4.5-inch 960×540 display, a Mediatek SoC (quad-core 1.3 GHz Cortex A7 CPU, unknown GPU), 1 GB of RAM, and 8 GB of on-board NAND storage. The storage can be expanded via a microSD slot, and the phone has two SIM card slots. It also contains a 5-megapixel, front-facing camera.
Scopes, Not Apps
Another notable feature of the Aquaris E4.5 is that it won’t include apps. Instead, Ubuntu will employ a new user experience paradigm called Scopes — contextual home-screen dashboards that the company promises will be simpler and less time-consuming to develop than native apps.
We reached out to Jan Dawson, chief analyst with Utah-based Jackdaw Research, who told us the lack of apps might not be a good selling point for the Ubuntu phone.
“Any new OS has to offer something radically new and different while still meeting customers’ basic needs,” he said. “I don’t see anything in the Ubuntu mobile OS that meets those criteria. The relative lack of apps on Windows Phone is still a deal breaker for that platform, and it has over three hundred thousand of them.”
The phone will be sold unlocked, but customers will be offered SIM bundles when buying the phone as part of Ubuntu’s deals with Portugal Telecom, GiffGaff in the U.K., Three in Sweden and Amena in Spain.
Open source Ubuntu is best known as an alternative operating system for non-Windows or Mac computers. Canonical plans to expand the operating system’s applications to other devices including tablets, smart devices and drones.
Trade Show Debut
BQ isn’t the first phone company to make a splash via a flash sale. Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi said it sold out all 40,000 units of its new Redmi 1S Android phone in just 4.2 seconds recently during a similar sale. The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition will be put on display at the upcoming Mobile World Congress industry trade show, to be held in Barcelona March 2-5.
“I’m really skeptical on the prospects for any new mobile operating system,” said Dawson. “Even Windows Phone, with all the money and marketing muscle Microsoft has put behind it, has failed to capture more than a couple of percent market share.”
