Crowdfunding an Ubuntu phone that doubles as your PC

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$600 is the “price” today for early backers - tomorrow its $830

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I don’t know that I’d call that chamfering “rakish”, but I do like the idea of a screen that doesn’t shatter when I look at it funny. *glares at SGS3*

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I couldn’t resist & bought the $600 phone. I’m a big Linux fan and I felt it was time to put my money where my mouth is. I’m sick of Google’s profiling and I won’t pay the Apple tax. I know Canonical have made some bad choices (in my opinion) over the Amazon spygate saga, but I’ll take my chances on them (well, until Firefox OS has some decent highend phones available in my country).

Also, it’s kinda exciting to watch and see if they make their funding goal.

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FWIW, they lost me at “4G”.

I like the idea that the handheld could function as a full portable PC when external peripherals are available, but I don’t need it to do much more than that. Give it the ability to talk to an external phone via bluetooth so you don’t have to maintain two separate contact lists, and all my needs are met.

I have zero – possibly negative – interest in pushing data at premium cost through phone lines. Free wifi is becoming darned near uibquitous where I actually need it, and people keep talking about making that a basic societal service on the order of road maintenance.

I understand that if they want the phone companies to invest they need to push features that will run up your phone bill, but this is a case where what the investors want is not what best serves the customers in the long run.

Cut the price by 60% and I still wouldn’t touch it.

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Um. Okay? Don’t buy it, then?

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Wow, Unbelievable! They already shattered the Indiegogo record for most money brought in by a single project according to this article: Ubuntu Edge Shatters Records in 12 Hours

I’m not as techy as y’all, but I definitely think this is pretty sweet. the thing I’m amazed about is amorphous metal. Knowing “amorphous” means “formless,” i was pretty confused.

Ti40Cu36Pd14Zr10 is believed to be noncarcinogenic, is about three times stronger than titanium, and its elastic modulus nearly matches bones. It has a high wear resistance and does not produce abrasion powder. The alloy does not undergo shrinkage on solidification. A surface structure can be generated that is biologically attachable by surface modification using laser pulses, allowing better joining with bone.

dude, holy crap. i never even heard of this. i don’t get how “3x stronger than titanium” works if the molecules don’t have a crystaline structure, but it is, apparently.

As I said, “For What It’s Worth”. There’s certainly a market for what they’re proposing, but I’m not convinced it’s the market they should be going after.

They’re trying to out iPhone the iPhone. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I think it’s time for another break.

Doubles as a very slow laptop…

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Yeah, I really wanna spend $600 on a thing that I’ll already be able to do with my phone, BEFORE the Edge is released.

http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android

Also: for anyone thinking that this will be slow and clunky; You’ve clearly not used Ubuntu. I have it running on a 5 year old cruddy laptop with no hard disk (you can run it from a thumb drive) and screws rattling around inside. Full support of touchpad, wifi, etc without any drivers.

These are the system reqs for the desktop version:

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Cripes. Maybe if I was made of money and could justify dropping $600-$850 on a device. Maybe someday I’ll be able to give back like that; oh, well. We’ll see what the second generation brings.

I know this is more pedestrian, but I’d be more interested in seeing something like a convertible tablet running Ubuntu, with that sexy mobile interface on the tablet and the more desktop-friendly look-and-feel on a monitor if it’s hooked up to one. Maybe a separate HDMI port so I don’t have to share/decide whether I want to use the USB port for MHL/SlimPort or OTG.

I know it’s almost possible to use some phones as a desktop, but this looks a lot less clunky.

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My experience with Ubuntu on 5 year old laptops is that the stupid graphics card driver doesn’t work so compositing doesn’t work so Unity looks like crap and doesn’t function properly.

I think funding strategy wise the 24hr ~30% discount was not a good idea. I’m sure it helped them generate buzz right at launch; but this would have gotten attention anyway and in the rest of the funding period I think it will lower sales as people will now feel they are overpaying by $230.

w…t…f…?

it has 802.11n and bluetooth also, you know…

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YMMV. I had none of those issues. Try using the on-board graphics of the motherboard and I bet you don’t have problems.

Not to sure what you’d need the graphics card for in a 5 y/o laptop anyway… that’s a web surfing / kids computer right there.

technogeek: lost you at 4G? I purposefully sought out a 4g phone cause I was sick of the tardy 3g network. I won’t but a phone that’s 3g any more.

Hold on, does Ubuntu for Android actually run on anything? Last I heard it was in deep alpha.

64MB, sure, that’s pretty tiny for a desktop (though i doubt you’ll enjoy using Gnome with that much ram, but sure, it’ll run).

But note: the Ubuntu Edge has 4MB (wow, did I screw that up; it has 4GB, which is of course more than enough — the rest stands) of ram, as in 1/16th of that.

The thing is, Ubuntu got where it got by exploiting extant resources and making them user-friendly. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course; i like Ubuntu. However, there simply aren’t a bunch of open source projects that Canonical can slap together to make a user-friendly smartphone. It would take real engineering by Canonical and afaik they haven’t done this before, which doesn’t inspire confidence.

I wish them the best and I hope it works, but I’m glad it’s Canonical doing it. If they do screw it up, there’s a decent chance that the backers can sue for their money back, as opposed to a smaller player.

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Fastest multi-core CPU, 4GB RAM, 128GB storage

…as in 64x that.

yeah, yeah, i got it, thanks.

you know, i remember when i was really annoyed that the household computer only had 2MB of RAM, which meant i couldn’t play Doom. just throwing that out there to rationalize how i could make such a silly mistake. that and the rye.

Not going to be powerful enough for my purposes, and even on a desktop Ubuntu won’t run any of the software I need.