This, or something like it, is the future: the computing device is portable, and adapts itself to the forms of input available. There's no reason why your display should have to be permanently attached to the device that drives it, and increasingly, it won't be.
I don't know what the implications are for Ubuntu or Android. But genuine support for a first-class computing experience is one of the few things that would tempt me back onto those platforms.
> This, or something like it, is the future: the computing device is portable, and adapts itself to the forms of input available
Maybe it is, but it's not the future I'd like best.
I would like to have a desktop in the cloud, and data in the cloud, and nothing in my pocket; nothing to lose or break or have to make sure it still has juice.
When I get somewhere to work (a client's, a café, a friend's, etc.), I log in to my cloud desktop using whatever dumb machine is available, and off I go. Everything I do is automatically saved, backed up, versioned, synchronized for me.
A portable computer is useful in the subway, but at the office? What benefits do we stand to gain from still having things run or be stored on a local machine?
Exactly. It would be great to be able to use an Optimus Prime or something as a mobile development machine. My dream for android development is definitely to be able to build and deploy on a single device.
Of course there's a way to go for that. The range of devices that support mobile docks is very small; I would prefer support for tablets with attached keyboards/mice. If they managed to get this working on tablets, I would definitely consider something like the transformer prime to replace my netbook.
I'm going to want to carry a "phone" for sure. Most people who've ever had a smartphone expect to have one the rest of their life.
I'm also going to want (at least) a machine with a keyboard and bigger display than my phone.
Why in the future would I want to tie one to the other? I wouldn't want that today — my computer works just fine without having to do some weird sync/plug-in dance with my phone when I want to use it. Even if this was seamless and even if we ignore concerns like finite batteries, what would I have gained besides a single point of failure?
I of course would like pervasive data sync. But why would I want the hardware of my computer to rely on the hardware of my phone?
Desktop PCs will always outperform portable devices. I think future docking stations will include both a big display and a big processor. When you dock your phone, your phone's apps will be running on the dock's fast processor while accessing your personal data off the phone. When you undock your phone, your running apps will seamlessly migrate to the phone's processor(s).
This will be extremely asymmetric multiprocessing.
You could push the ease-of-use even further with wireless HDMI, A2DP, and Bluetooth HIDs. Imagine: sit at a desk, without your phone even leaving your pocket. The wireless HDMI monitor, Bluetooth keyboard, and Bluetooth A2DP speakers automatically pair up with your phone. You just start using the device, eg. show a video to your friends, or start working. Stand up and leave. The phone unpairs itself from the monitor/speakers/keyboard, free to be used by the next person.
(If security is a concern, make this less automatic, eg. make the pairing require pressing a button on the phone.)
I have been waiting for precisely that concept to take off for years, namely using your cellphone as your portable computer.
To me, that seems like a lot of trouble to share a relatively trivial amount of hardware. Hardware which is optimised for different, fairly specific circumstances, incidently.
But with all that running, you won't be working for longer than an hour or two. I really like the Palm/HP Touchstone charger, and I wish wireless charging would take off. It'd be nice to just sit in my cube while all my devices charge in a 3' radius of my desk.
Canonical may not have the resources or funds of Apple or Microsoft but they are innovating better than both at the moment. Unity is daring to be different on the desktop, and Ubuntu on Android is a simple idea that could really change the way people think about the PC. The ideas might not all work out in the long term but for sheer creative thinking you have got to applaud what they are doing.
I know it's immature of me to note this, but what's up with the logo to the left of "Ready to talk?". Is it just me, or is it faintly reminiscent of... well, something else?
I really hate to say it, but I would agree. Either Canonical has a sense of humor, or they need to think about how their users interpret their interfaces more.
We have struggled to get a BIOS that is Free / Libre
And where does this leave us now? Just because Ubuntu is free, if the phone manufacturers start to get trusted mobile computing (tm) disease, we are still in trouble.
"Curated" is still not free
And there are some obvious holes - you cant carry a monitor around with you. So you need docking stations to plug into. Do you trust the keyboard in the Public library not to watch your keystrokes?
Ubuntu and Android share the same kernel. When docked,
the Ubuntu OS boots and runs concurrently with Android.
This allows both mobile and desktop functionality to
co-exist in different runtimes.
It looks great, but I still think Google needs to make it so when docked like this, what you see on the PC screen is the "tablet UI" of Android. It makes more sense, and you don't even have to waste resources running 2 OS's on a mobile processor.
Reminds me of doing the Debian chroot on the Nokia N8x0. That's been around for quite awhile. It's nice to be able to apt-get whatever you need. It's prohibitively slow to use on a device from 2007 though and overclocking is a bit risky and drains the battery quickly.
(Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I still use one of these things rather than the brand new 1.2 GHz dual core Android phone sitting next to it in my bag.)
I don't really see this panning out unless Ubuntu runs on the mobile screen as well. I'd also hope that the curated experience can be replaced with, well, anything else. Ubuntu is increasingly becoming a forced experience and reconfiguring things is a waste of time. Configuring something to how you want to use it is also a lot more educational than trying to figure out where to disable the new configuration.
I use a chroot on my Touchpad to run Ubuntu with LXDE. It's... workable, but no where near "desktop" quality. The lack of a mouse kills it, and LXDE isn't really touch optimized. It's really nice to have around when there are apps you need to use that are run better (or easier) from a GUI, and the dual core 1.5Ghz processor with 1GB of RAM is sufficient to keep it running without hiccup (until I load Eclipse).
With some low-end (or ARM) optimization, Ubuntu would rock the mobile productivity world.
If Microsoft was smart, this would be exactly how their Win8 tablets should work - plug it into a dock and it turns into a Desktop PC. Ubuntu and Microsoft are in an awesome place here that Apple is going to miss out on.
Is this going to be available to end users to install themselves, or is Canonical holding out for handset makers to respond to this and partner with them?
Sadly, since so many of the big Android guys are also in bed with or paying some kind of extortion to Microsoft, I would expect there to be some amount of pressure and possibly economic incentives for the big Android ODMs to NOT to ship this.
Beyond that, is any carrier going to be interested in offering subs Ubuntu? (Idk, maybe?) Put this into the hands of end users first even if it's a "sloppy" / hack-ish install. That's the way to get it out there.
I admit, this would get me to bite the bullet if integrated with one of the existing laptop dock solutions for Android phones such as the Motorola Atrix 4G Lapdock or the ASUS Transformer Prime. Ubuntu is enough for me to do everything I need a computer for, except for some rare book keeping that has to be done over a VPN only supported on Windows/Mac. Instead of bringing my phone and laptop on all trips I'd just have my phone and laptop dock. The laptop docks seem much lighter and having the same stored data and same wireless data connection without tethering would be handy.
I can see this working really well for younger users, non-power-users, and non-techies who want to carry around their desktop environment and whose needs are met by web apps like Google Docs.
I can also see its potential in developing countries where many people have a phone and a TV but not a PC.
The medium-term goal is sort of obvious: Ubuntu running on the phone with the ability to display Unity on its own tiny screen or on larger external displays and allowing the user to interact with it via touch or via external input devices like keyboards, mice, etc.
I think this is a great step in the right direction, and we've already observed a compression of devices recently. Consider the Laptop, Desktop & phone. Who still uses a desktop? Its really just a matter of time until we compress the laptop and phone, we're a long way off in my opinion (in terms of actually usable hardware) but once we have the power and portable input devices (i think one could already structure an argument to say we have them) i don't know what would hold it back.
Now I begin to understand why Canonical made those recent changes. The Ubuntu part of it seems kinda slow, but smartphones are going to get faster. [1]
That's where the whole world is headed. As a general consumer, why have a desktop when you can dock your phone/tablet and playback or stream videos, edit content and browse the web?
Absolutely, except minus the dock and right now. If you have an apple TV you can already mirror your iPhone 4S, iPad 2, or Mac (with Mountain Lion) to the display with airplay. It's pretty neat, especially considering the quality of games hitting the phone (such as GTA3). I think there's a whole slew of apps that could be made (right now) to transform this paradigm into something all consumers use instead of just the technically adventurous.
I think that's exactly where they're heading. Apple filed for a patent a couple of years ago for an iMac style enclosure that could dock a tablet computer. It probably makes more sense to do this via a tablet instead of a phone.
"Ubuntu is the killer app for multi-core phones in 2012"
This text is displayed as if it's a quote, but as far as I can tell, it's not: http://goo.gl/vKHOI (link is to a Google search for the above text). If there's anyone from Canonical here, can you comment on why that is presented as a quote, or what/where it's a quote from, if it is in fact a quote?
As far as I see, this is the text of reference: Newer multi-core processors are up to the job, and Ubuntu is the killer app for that hot hardware. It’s the must-have feature for late-2012 high-end Android phones.
The quote itself is outside the text body and refers to the text body. For a marketing text like this, I don't think that kind of quoting is difficult to understand or swallow.
i don't see canonical and google working too closely together on this, as google has a competing OS that they're trying to push: chrome. and now with the introduction of chrome for android, there's no reason why your cell phone couldn't turn into a chromebox when it gets plugged into a similar dock.
Its the obvious extension of the current model. Kudos to Canonical for giving it a go.
I was expecting Apple or MS to move in this direction and I seem to recall a POC/patent application/Mock up from a few years back showing an iMac with a removable iPhone/iPod as the home directory. Maybe I'm misremembering.
I know this is Ubuntu on Android, but all I can think of is Windows 8. Doesn't this seem like an inevitability for Microsoft? Intel even has x86 mobile chips on the way.
[+] [-] bguthrie|14 years ago|reply
I don't know what the implications are for Ubuntu or Android. But genuine support for a first-class computing experience is one of the few things that would tempt me back onto those platforms.
[+] [-] bambax|14 years ago|reply
Maybe it is, but it's not the future I'd like best.
I would like to have a desktop in the cloud, and data in the cloud, and nothing in my pocket; nothing to lose or break or have to make sure it still has juice.
When I get somewhere to work (a client's, a café, a friend's, etc.), I log in to my cloud desktop using whatever dumb machine is available, and off I go. Everything I do is automatically saved, backed up, versioned, synchronized for me.
A portable computer is useful in the subway, but at the office? What benefits do we stand to gain from still having things run or be stored on a local machine?
[+] [-] genbattle|14 years ago|reply
Of course there's a way to go for that. The range of devices that support mobile docks is very small; I would prefer support for tablets with attached keyboards/mice. If they managed to get this working on tablets, I would definitely consider something like the transformer prime to replace my netbook.
[+] [-] glhaynes|14 years ago|reply
I'm going to want to carry a "phone" for sure. Most people who've ever had a smartphone expect to have one the rest of their life.
I'm also going to want (at least) a machine with a keyboard and bigger display than my phone.
Why in the future would I want to tie one to the other? I wouldn't want that today — my computer works just fine without having to do some weird sync/plug-in dance with my phone when I want to use it. Even if this was seamless and even if we ignore concerns like finite batteries, what would I have gained besides a single point of failure?
I of course would like pervasive data sync. But why would I want the hardware of my computer to rely on the hardware of my phone?
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
This will be extremely asymmetric multiprocessing.
[+] [-] mrb|14 years ago|reply
(If security is a concern, make this less automatic, eg. make the pairing require pressing a button on the phone.)
I have been waiting for precisely that concept to take off for years, namely using your cellphone as your portable computer.
[+] [-] morsch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|14 years ago|reply
Why are there no wireless-charging mice?
[+] [-] rbanffy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbog|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shapeshed|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strags|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untog|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readme|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|14 years ago|reply
"Curated" is still not free
And there are some obvious holes - you cant carry a monitor around with you. So you need docking stations to plug into. Do you trust the keyboard in the Public library not to watch your keystrokes?
[+] [-] dave1010uk|14 years ago|reply
From the features page [0]:
[0] http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android/features-and-specs[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orbitingpluto|14 years ago|reply
(Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I still use one of these things rather than the brand new 1.2 GHz dual core Android phone sitting next to it in my bag.)
I don't really see this panning out unless Ubuntu runs on the mobile screen as well. I'd also hope that the curated experience can be replaced with, well, anything else. Ubuntu is increasingly becoming a forced experience and reconfiguring things is a waste of time. Configuring something to how you want to use it is also a lot more educational than trying to figure out where to disable the new configuration.
[+] [-] freehunter|14 years ago|reply
With some low-end (or ARM) optimization, Ubuntu would rock the mobile productivity world.
[+] [-] xpaulbettsx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|14 years ago|reply
However, Windows on ARM only allows one Desktop app, Office.
[+] [-] hollerith|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spinchange|14 years ago|reply
Sadly, since so many of the big Android guys are also in bed with or paying some kind of extortion to Microsoft, I would expect there to be some amount of pressure and possibly economic incentives for the big Android ODMs to NOT to ship this.
Beyond that, is any carrier going to be interested in offering subs Ubuntu? (Idk, maybe?) Put this into the hands of end users first even if it's a "sloppy" / hack-ish install. That's the way to get it out there.
[+] [-] schpet|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|14 years ago|reply
I can also see its potential in developing countries where many people have a phone and a TV but not a PC.
The medium-term goal is sort of obvious: Ubuntu running on the phone with the ability to display Unity on its own tiny screen or on larger external displays and allowing the user to interact with it via touch or via external input devices like keyboards, mice, etc.
[+] [-] verelo|14 years ago|reply
Good to see we're headed in a sensible direction.
[+] [-] mitakas|14 years ago|reply
Now I begin to understand why Canonical made those recent changes. The Ubuntu part of it seems kinda slow, but smartphones are going to get faster. [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUXUjjg9qQ0 [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5559/qualcomm-snapdragon-s4-kr...
[+] [-] fredsted|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylerritchie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newhouseb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsz0|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|14 years ago|reply
This text is displayed as if it's a quote, but as far as I can tell, it's not: http://goo.gl/vKHOI (link is to a Google search for the above text). If there's anyone from Canonical here, can you comment on why that is presented as a quote, or what/where it's a quote from, if it is in fact a quote?
[+] [-] stroboskop|14 years ago|reply
The quote itself is outside the text body and refers to the text body. For a marketing text like this, I don't think that kind of quoting is difficult to understand or swallow.
[+] [-] gjmveloso|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiralpolitik|14 years ago|reply
I was expecting Apple or MS to move in this direction and I seem to recall a POC/patent application/Mock up from a few years back showing an iMac with a removable iPhone/iPod as the home directory. Maybe I'm misremembering.
[+] [-] ajasmin|14 years ago|reply
Even having access to some command line packages on the phone would be a big improvement over the minimal busybox stuff that comes with Android.
[+] [-] JoelSutherland|14 years ago|reply