Ubuntu Touch Launches One Day Before Windows 8.1
How convenient.
QA community coordinator Nicholas Skaggs said that the Ubuntu team is a month away from releasing Saucy Salamander, AKA Ubuntu 13.10. As part of the release, the team will also launch an image of Ubuntu Touch that can be installed on supported devices including the Galaxy Nexus (takju or yakju), the Nexus 4 (occam), the Nexus 7 (nakasi or nakasig) and the Nexus 10 (mantaray).
"And while folks have been dogfooding the images since May, many changes have continued to land as the images mature," Skaggs said. "As such, the QA team is committing to test each of the stable images released, and do exploratory testing against new features and specific packagesets. If you have a device, I would encourage you to join this effort!"
"Only four and a half weeks to go and phone 1.0 will be a reality!" added Canonical technical architect Loïc Minier. "Obviously we're all trying to finish or fix lots of things in the remaining time, but that might include hard-to-track-down and painful regressions."
The developer version of Ubuntu Touch was actually released back in February for the devices listed above. The touchy platform is basically a clean mobile interface for Ubuntu, but will also launch the full-blown desktop version when the mobile device is connected to a desktop monitor. This is the very feature Android owners have clamored for over the last several years, only now it's supplied by Canonical instead.
"Everything you need to know can be found upon this wiki page," Skaggs said. "You'll need a nexus device and a little time to spend with the latest image. If you find a bug, report it! The wiki has links to help. Testing doesn't get any more fun than this; flash your phone and try to break it! Go wild!"
Although version 1.0 will be available to download next month, actual devices shipping with Ubuntu Touch won't arrive until late 2013 or early 2014. Canonical already tried to create a flagship Ubuntu Edge phone over the summer by launching a $32 million Idiegogo crowd-funding project, but failed to reach its goal by $19 million. Now it's up to actual handset makers to produce Ubuntu Touch products.
"While we passionately wanted to build the Edge to showcase Ubuntu on phones, the support and attention it received will still be a huge boost as other Ubuntu phones start to arrive in 2014," said Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth. "Thousands of you clearly want to own an Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured you won’t have much longer to wait."
Ubuntu Touch arrives on October 17, just one day before Microsoft's Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1 go live. Clever.
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The vision of having a completely uncompromized mobile environment transform into an equally uncompromised desktop environment when docked with a keyboard and or mouse is very interesting. An operating system that adjusts itself based on screen size and the input devices attached to it.
Plug your phone into a dock connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard and it becomes a desktop. Plug your tablet into a keyboard dock and it becomes a desktop. Disconnect and it's instantly back to tablet mode. No fussing with different screens, silly start buttons, or a touch interface that also has to be mouse compatible.
Also, since most of the Ubuntu app repository is already optimized for ARM, there are very few compatibility issues that way.
I'm not sure how well received another mobile os will be, but Ubuntu Touch has generally received some pretty good reviews from testers.
You can do a nandroid backup of your system, that will restore the OS and the apps/settings. In order to do that you need to have a custom recovery installed (or at least booted into).
Alternatively, you can use an app to perform a backup of your apps/data (like My Backup or Helium, if not rooted, to use with it's desktop counterpart), or Titanium Backup (if rooted). Also, download the appropriate system image from Google (the one that corresponds to your hardware model). When done experimenting, you can reinstall that factory image, then restore your apps and data from the backup.
Not complicated, but a bit time consuming.
Epic would have a hard time sueing Canonical over "UT3" seeing as how it would most likely be a consumer applied acronym and not one applied by Canonical.