Canonical has been talking about making Ubuntu on tablets and phones a reality now for several years, and in recent months we have finally seen a few devices come on the market. A review of the Meizu Pro 5, a Ubuntu-powered smart phone that is compatible with North American 4G networks, appeared on DistroWatch.The article covers how Ubuntu compares to Android and explores the differences between traditional apps vs Ubuntu scopes:
Scopes are a slightly unusual concept in the smart phone market, but I grew to appreciate the idea. What eventually gave me the “a-ha” moment when it came to scopes was when I realised scopes are for looking at information and apps for doing things. Scopes are always on, always waiting in the background to provide us with small bits of data. Applications are for performing tasks. A scope will tell me what is on my calendar for the day, an application will create new appointments. A scope will tell me who called me recently while an app will place a new call.
I have had no interest in smartphones up to now at all, but I would like to give one of these a try.
The big problem is that they can’t be found anywhere, if Canonical want these out in the wild they will have to convince at least one major manufacturer to release them.
The Pro 6 is supposed to be released later this year though, so maybe they will be easier to get after then.
I hope so anyway, they definitely look and sound a LOT better than IOS or Android which I have no interest in.
Just make the bloody things available!
I agree. It seems most places that are making Ubuntu phones hedged their bets, releasing only a small number of phones which quickly sold out. This means we will probably see more models of later Ubuntu phones being sold (yay), but also means they are hard to get now if you were not at the head of the line.
“the Today scope showed temperatures in the weather forecast in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius. This can be adjusted by changing our selected language in the device’s settings panel”
What on earth does language have to do with temperature units?!? How about the date and time formats? Do I have to change the language to change those as well? What about the time-zone? Surely the people at Canonical are not so clueless that they would confuse language with nationality or preferences, especially since they have, what, 12 official languages down there in SA. Could someone else confirm this weirdness?
US English and British English use totally different temperature unit and date formats. It is 3/8/16 in Australia and 8/3/16 in America.
The temperature unit is in no way bound to the language. It has nothing to do with language.
(And even the date format is more related to the location/culture than to the language.)
That is why most operating systems, including Ubuntu Touch, bundle different regional rules for variations of the same language. For English there is a UK, US, Canada and Australian variet. Each with its own set of date/time and temperature rules. This is pretty common practice with any OS.
Good for English, but not the point.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that while I’m Finnish and live in Finland I want to have my language set to US English. Currently this forces e.g. wrong temperature unit among other things. I want to keep the rest of the localization like it is in Finland, not like it is in United States. Android and other operating systems have no problems with this.
There’s a bug filed about this and the devs are well aware of the issue:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-system-settings/+bu…
Edited 2016-08-03 12:49 UTC
Losing 5% of charge per hour while watching videos or anything else that requires having the screen on? Sounds unbelievable to me. Batteries also don’t charge linearly in 20% per hour increments.
I was surprised not to see any specs about the screen/cpu/gpu/battery. I guess it is a Full-HD screen because of the resolution of the screenshot but nothing mentioned about that at all which seems strange because he did mention details as “3 GB RAM in total, 1 for the OS, 2 for the apps” and “30 GB storage, 26 available”
A very positive review of a device and OS that I will probably never see in real life
The specs are very easy to look up. Just head to the product page. http://www.meizu.com/en/products/pro5/spec.html
In short the screen is 1920×1080, the rest of the hardware includes, (copy and pasted).
Exynos 7420 processor
ARM® Cortex®-A57™2.1GHz x4 + ARM® Cortex®-A53™ 1.5 GHz x4
Mali T760 GPU
3GB/4GB LPDDR4 RAM
It is supplied with either 32GB or 64GB of storage.
Thanks!
(I didn’t look up the specs because it seemed like any other mid-level phone with a unique OS.)
The reviewer did a great job at pointing out the OS and actual use and not the hardware which is something that I am not used to seeing much.
The Meizu Pro 6 is listed for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk, although only the Android version.
It’s not boding well for the Ubuntu version when it isn’t even listed!