[Herts] Herts Digest, Vol 312, Issue 2

[luton98 at ircha.eclipse.co.uk]

 Ubuntu on a mobile.

I saw this, and took a quick peak at the Canonical promo video (not
all of it - it was 25 minutes, I haven't got that type of attention
span!).

I thought it was a really good move, but realistically I have to
accept there will be a considerable closing down of the ecosystem as
we've seen with Windows/Android/iPhone and RIM.

The development environment looked interesting though - based on Qt,
which might allow fast apps written in C++.

I used a debian based mobile for just over a year, and there was lots
to like. I still have it for occassional use. What I liked:

* VPN
* shell
* some perl apps, reall perl scripting
* The same FTP client I used on my desktop (though a bit small to be
user friendly)
* The ability to ssh into the phone to mess with the file system,
extract photos, put on bash scripts
* Once connected with a USB cable, it appeared as an external drive
* installing apps, connecting to beta repositories was easy

What I didn't like:

* The browsers were idiosynchratic, slow and quickly lost Flash
support
* The UI was a tad sluggish for my liking
* General lack of support (that's more a marketing, product problem
though)

The last thing I want to do on a phone is talk on it. I want it for
data - I want to be able to browse web pages, pick up email, forward
files, remotely control Linux and Windows boxes, take photos and
upload them socially, or for diagnostic work. I want quick access to
contacts, i.e. I want a tablet I can put in my pocket.

So, provided the sysadmin apps exist, this sounds like a great move.

I now have a Windows phone, which I think is a fail. It's not Windows
on a phone, but a different OS. Applications, data and infrastructure
(e.g. ethernet, bluetooth and USB connectivity) are all different for
the phone compared with the desktop. Canonical's claim is that Ubuntu
is an environment you can see from Arm to Intel, phone to server and
everything in between.

We'll see.

Andrew

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