The Ubuntu Touch experience

As promised, Canonical released installable versions of its upcoming "Ubuntu Touch" distribution for a small set of devices on February 21. Your editor, being in possession of a Galaxy Nexus phone just waiting for an obscure firmware load, decided to give it a try. Running Ubuntu on a telephone is an interesting and refreshing experience, but Canonical has quite a bit of ground to cover before Ubuntu Touch will be competitive with the other offerings on the market now.

Installing the firmware image is a relatively easy thing to do, especially if one happens to have an Ubuntu desktop system sitting around. One simply adds the "phablet-team/tools" repository, installs a few packages, plugs in an (unlocked) device, then runs "phablet-flash". The operation failed with a mysterious message on the first attempt, but the second worked fine. The biggest negative effect (other than wiping all the data on the phone, which was expected) is the lingering distaste that the term "phablet" leaves in one's mouth. One can only hope that word will soon fade into well-deserved obscurity.

The device boots fairly quickly into an Ubuntu-themed lock screen, shown on the left. The "social" focus of the distribution is made clear by the claim on the lock screen that 14 tweets have been received — interesting news to your editor who had not yet informed the device about his Twitter account. Indeed, he has yet to get around to creating a Twitter account to tell the phone about. The lock screen, like much of this release, is a mock-up, doomed to proclaim those 14 tweets forevermore. The installed system also comes complete with fake messages, contacts, appointments, and more; your editor initially thought that some data had leaked from a developer's device, but that data's inclusion is deliberate. The hope is to give a feel for what working with the device will be like when all the expected functionality is present.

Getting out of the lock screen is not as obvious an operation as one might expect the first time around. Ubuntu Touch is heavily based on "swipe" gestures; a swipe from each edge of the screen yields a different result. In the lock screen, swiping from the left produces a variant of the familiar Unity icon bar; swiping from the right drops the phone into whatever application was running when the lock screen took over. Swipes from the right will switch applications when the lock screen is not present; a swipe from the bottom will usually produce some sort of application-specific screen (sometimes nothing happens at all), often with a search bar in it. The left-edge swipe gesture will normally cause the Unity bar to make a brief, useless, and confusing appearance while the home screen array shows up.

Your editor says "array" because the home screen is actually five screens: from left to right they are devoted to music, people (messages and appointments), a "home home" screen with a mix of everything from "favorite apps" to "videos popular online" (shown on the right), applications, and videos. Yes, "music" and "videos" are as far apart as possible, and, yes, those screens will happily sell you stuff to listen to or watch. Or, at least, the video screen will; the music screen is blank. How does one move between these screens? By dragging them to the left or right, of course. One just has to be careful to drag from somewhere other than the edge, or the phone interprets the gesture as one of the above-described swipe operations instead. Suffice to say it is easy to end up with the wrong operation.

At the top is a typical status/notification bar; swiping down from the top edge provides access to the controls found underneath. There are several sets of controls to be obtained this way, each behind one of the small icons in the top bar. It is easy for a fat-fingered user to get the wrong one, making the interface a little frustrating. Most of the controls are relatively self-explanatory. The screen brightness control lives behind the battery icon, which may be surprising to some.

On the subject of the battery: the device's battery life when running Ubuntu is horrendous, on the order of a few hours. In a way, that is surprising; Ubuntu is using the Android kernel for this device (actually, amusingly, it's the CyanogenMod 3.0.31 kernel) so there should not be significant power management problems at that level. The obvious conclusion is that Ubuntu's user space is running the battery down. Perhaps that user space is not well integrated with Android's wakelock mechanism at this point; it is hard to say. Power consumption should be a solvable problem, in any case.

In general, the Ubuntu Touch experience is rather unpolished at this point; there are enough rough edges that one would be well advised to wear gloves while working with the interface. The keyboard goes into an immortal mode where only rebooting the device will make it go away; the fact that the keycaps are always shown in upper case despite the keyboard's mode also makes it harder to use. There is no word completion or spelling correction in this release. The photo gallery has no "pinch zoom" feature. There appears to be no provision for using the screen in the landscape orientation at all. A number of the applications are false fronts; the weather application looks nice, but only if one is interested in what was happening in Las Vegas on January 8. The device is often sluggish in its response and gets worse the longer it runs. And so on. But this is a preview image, it's expected to be that way.

Does it function as a phone? There is no signal strength indicator or any other sign that the phone is on a cellular network. But, surprisingly enough, the phone function works, in that the device can make and receive calls and send SMS messages. The dialer is rudimentary but functional; it has some quirks, though, like the decision that the dial pad and the mute button will not be accessible at the same time. Mobile data does not work, though, but WiFi does. There is no working Bluetooth functionality.

The camera application is also rudimentary, but it is able to take pictures. The flash works, and the application can use the sensors on both the front and back of the phone. There is a video-recording mode, but it does not work. There is no provision for panoramic photos, "scene" modes, or any of the other fancy features that have found their way into the Android camera in recent times. There is a basic WebKit-based browser that works, along with a GMail application; there is no provision for reading email hosted anywhere else. There is no way to install third-party applications in this preview; one assumes that capability will be well supported by the time Ubuntu Touch becomes a real product.

Given that the system is running on an Android base, an obvious question comes to mind: why not install the Dalvik runtime and support Android applications? That would immediately bring a wide range of applications to the device. No such feature exists now, though, and your editor would guess that no such thing is forthcoming. Ubuntu may hope to make money directly with its distribution for mobile devices, but, one suspects, it is control over the application ecosystem that really brings the dollar signs to Mark Shuttleworth's eyes. So, naturally, Canonical will want to remain in control of media and application purchases so that it can get its cut. The company's motivation is straightforward, but the result is a system that cannot take advantage of all the mobile applications that already exist.

One nice feature of running an Ubuntu-based distribution is that there is a full Ubuntu command-line user space available. There is no terminal emulator application on the device, but the Android adb utility can be used to obtain a shell; after that, it is possible to install and run an SSH server. The full Ubuntu repository is available; the phone appeared to be happy to install Eclipse when asked, for example (your editor, not being a total fool, canceled the operation). The X Window System is included in the image, but, since the display is not running X (it runs Android's SurfaceFlinger), X applications cannot be run. In the end, though, having a full Linux system on the device is refreshing; it feels more like home.

As of this writing, images for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 phones are available; there are also images for the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. Canonical would clearly like to support a much wider range of hardware, though, especially if it can get the community to help out with the porting work. Developers interested in hacking on Ubuntu Touch on other devices can consult the detailed porting guide. A quick look at the work in progress list suggests that a number of developers have already taken up this challenge.

Ubuntu Touch is an ambitious move by Canonical. The mobile world is already dominated by two established systems with other contenders (Tizen and Firefox OS, for example) about to enter the fray. But it is also where a lot of the interesting action is. If Ubuntu can be successful here, it may well bring Linux to the "desktop" in a way that has proved elusive with traditional computers. Getting there will require a lot of work, though. Patience with half-finished products is not high in the consumer electronics world; all of those rough edges and missing applications will need to be taken care of before Ubuntu Touch can be presented as a real product. Only then can the difficult task of convincing vendors to build hardware around this distribution begin. But, if all that can be made to happen, Canonical might just earn itself a place in this market.

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