Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge [LWN.net]

Jono Bacon announces that Canonical will be building and shipping a "fully converged" device called the "Ubuntu Edge" — all funded by a $32 million Indiegogo campaign. "The Ubuntu Edge will dual boot Ubuntu and Android, and will transform into a PC when docked with a monitor, with the full Ubuntu desktop and shared access to all the phone’s files. For this it needs the power of a PC, so Ubuntu Edge will be equipped with the latest, fastest processor, at least 4GB of RAM and a massive 128GB of storage."

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Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 18:26 UTC (Mon) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (19 responses)

They may crack the 1m pretty fast, but once the day one deal expires the funding will crawl to maybe 10m max.

I don't know why they set the bar so high and the time so short. Indiegogo might not take a cut like kickstarter, but the people are just not there to reach high goals.

Maybe this is just really cheap viral marketing. That has obviously worked really well.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 19:38 UTC (Mon) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] (17 responses)

If anything has a chance of hitting that kind of goal, it's this. It comes from a fairly well known company with a good brand, and a record of shipping (software, it's true, not hardware). The per-unit price is high enough that it doesn't require an insane number of backers. It's a pretty sexy phone, and it will be the first flagship phone of a brand new phone OS, based on a well liked desktop OS, that also happens to run the world's most popular existing smartphone OS.

According to this graph from this post, 30 day projects generally get about 7.5% of their backers on each of the first two days, before falling precipitously. That would be about $2.4 M per day, for the first two days. Of course, this has a substantial reward for first-day backers, so let's pad that out and say it needs to hit at least $3 M on the first day to be viable. At $950,000 already, just a few hours after it's first announced, it's definitely well on track to hit that.

Now, that may not be enough. Ouya, one of Kickstarter's biggest projects, got $2.5 M on their first day, but only wound up with $8.5 M overall. If the funding for the Edge is more like that, they would need about $9.5 M on their first day to be in the running, which does seem unrealistic. However, a few points in favor of the Edge are the larger per-unit prices, meaning fewer additional backers needed to sustain a reasonable funding level, and that Ouya exceeded their goal within the first day, so never had the "we need to get the word out to make this happen" kind of marketing after it.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 21:01 UTC (Mon) by ken (subscriber, #625) [Link] (7 responses)

I was going to jump on this but when the screen to actually pay show up there was no way to do it without a paypal account :( guess I have to pass.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 21:08 UTC (Mon) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] (6 responses)

Do you just object on principle to PayPal, or are you in a country where you can't get one? All you need for a PayPal account is a credit or debit card; you don't need to link it to a bank account unless you want to receive money. I have one for a few things that choose to use PayPal rather than getting their own credit card account, and it works fine for me.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 11:35 UTC (Tue) by dps (guest, #5725) [Link] (5 responses)

If an organisation uses paypal instead of their own merchant account, I think twice before buying. Is there a reason the people can't get a merchant account, and if so should I be worried by it?

There is also the legal angle: if I pay more than £100 and less than a vast amount directly then the bank is jointly and severally liable for the fulfilment of the contract[1]. If I use paypal instead then I don't get equivalent legally enforcible rights.

If any proposition looks financially challenging then a bank being jointly liable for any loss is worth quite a lot to me. I also know banks have fraud departments that can make who just ignore you take their end of a contract seriously. Can anyone say that about paypal?

That said I am one of those strange people with a mobile phone without a touch screen, camera, bluetooth, data calling, tethering, web browser, java, 3G, LTE or almost any other feature you might be expecting. Phone calls and text messages on the GSM frequencies is use where I live work.

[1] Banks reclaim the money for refunds from merchants who have very few rights when this happens.

credit

Posted Jul 23, 2013 13:39 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

Indeed. Unless a company is very new a likely explanation for why they can't get a merchant account is that the bank deems them too high a risk for defaulting. ie you will use your card, the company takes the money (from the bank, remember) and then you don't get a product and ask for the money back so the bank has to try to reclaim it from the quite possibly now bankrupt or disappeared retailer.

This will happen anyway once in a while, and the charges from the card operators reflect that. A supermarket pays very low card rates partly because it's deemed a super-low risk. Of a supermarket's card transactions only a tiny fraction represent goods promised but not yet delivered at time of the transaction. Contrast that with an online electronics retailer, where there may be several weeks of transaction that are unfulfilled at any particular time. Those are all floating risk, the card company is on the hook for every penny until the deliveries complete successfully. Unsurprisingly then this sort of business doesn't get the best rates.

The US doesn't have an equivalent of Section 75 as far as I know, but there is still pressure on card companies to give their customers a refund.

credit

Posted Jul 23, 2013 17:59 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Indeed. Unless a company is very new a likely explanation for why they can't get a merchant account is that the bank deems them too high a risk for defaulting. ie you will use your card, the company takes the money (from the bank, remember) and then you don't get a product and ask for the money back so the bank has to try to reclaim it from the quite possibly now bankrupt or disappeared retailer.

If people can convince regular investors that they have solid business case then they can just take a loan, no need for crowdfunding!

The whole freaking point of the crowdfounding is to collect money for something new and unproven! How can you expect a refund in such a case? You may sue campaign creators if the thing will turn out to be a fraud and get some of the money back that way, but to expect full refund from the system which is build exactly for cases where people deal with something new, risky and unproven... it's just beyond crazy.

You can only get all your money back in one case: if campaign is unsuccessful and funds are not collected. In this case PayPal works as fine as any bank. Everything else is not covered by usual credit card usage rules thus use of PayPal looks entirely appropriate. PayPal is created for just such cases!

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 17:51 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Is there a reason the people can't get a merchant account, and if so should I be worried by it?

Of course there is!

If I use paypal instead then I don't get equivalent legally enforcible rights.

And that's the whole point of the excercise!

You said it quite well yourself: Banks reclaim the money for refunds from merchants who have very few rights when this happens.

PayPal is there to protect fundraisers from the fraud on the other side. If you'll actually spend few minutes and read FAQ then you'll find out that you, in fact, are not signing a contract which promises to deliver something (phone or anything else), but you are participating in campaign where someone collects money for the "good cause". Sure, organizer can provide a reward (phone in this case) but it's between you and campaigner. Indiegogo collects money and gives them to campaign organizer, it does not guarantee delivery or anything like this. Come on: money are usually collected to create something new, not ever seen before, what kind of guarantees do you expect? Yet...

If any proposition looks financially challenging then a bank being jointly liable for any loss is worth quite a lot to me. I also know banks have fraud departments that can make who just ignore you take their end of a contract seriously. Can anyone say that about paypal?

Well... I think you've explained why PayPal is vital quite well, right? I mean: the whole system is built with one goal only - to make sure you'll not have unreasonable expectations, it's constructed in such a way as to make sure campaign creators (like Canonical here) will not have problems of unreasonable expectation and yet you still insist that you must have these "liabilities for any loss" rights? PayPal forms the next layer of defence, nothing more, nothing less.

P.S. It's strange idea to participate in highly risky endeavor with outcome unknown in advance and complain that PayPal is there to ensure that you'll follow the rules. Don't like rules? Don't participate. But to blame PayPal use for the case where it's used exactly right... that's just irrational.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 18:13 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

One very good reason to use PayPal (or Amazon Payments, or Google Payments) is that it avoids the need to run systems that process credit card numbers.

The expense isn't in the systems, or in getting the merchant account, it's is dealing with PCI auditors (the type of people who insist that you must run anti-virus software on your *nix systems, because their guidelines say that every system must have anti-virus software)

Avoiding this entire audit mess is worth a LOT

besides, it's not Cannonical that is processing the payments, it's indiegogo that's doing this, and they are the ones who picked the payment methods.

PCI

Posted Jul 23, 2013 20:02 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

You do not need to process credit card numbers in your own systems; you can get any credit card processor to do it for you. Or PayPal, or the other systems you mentioned (which may just act as a credit card processor since users can pay through them but using their own credit cards). Perhaps PayPal gives lower processing rates than a more traditional credit card processor; that may be the only cause for choosing them.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 21:20 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

This got me thinking... if there was a reputable futures market where one could bet against projects making their funding goals... it might actually help projects get past the last mile of funding and suck money out of naysayers to help fund projects.

Huh? What?!? Bets against a project will help fund projects you say?!?
Yes... here's the hypothetical.

For projects that are zero risks to backers if unfunded, and have their pledged money not withdrawn from them, you can have a futures market where project backers and project naysayers make futures market side bets as to whether a project will reach a certain funding percent level by a certain amount of time. If the project make the goal, the naysayer's bet gets added to the backer's project funding pledge. If the goal isn't met and the project ultimately doesn't get funded then the backer's pledge portion matching the naysayer amount is deducted from the backer and paid to the naysayer. If the project gets funded, but a particular goal isn't met the futures market bet is nullified as if it never happened, with the backer's entire pledge going to the project.

Basically the idea is it gives backers the ability to doubledown on their initial project support with naysayer money without risking anything more than their initial monetary pledge. Once pledged and made part of a naysayers market action, the backer's money is going to go somewhere..either to the project or to the naysayer. The new risk is entirely with the naysayer, who might lose their money to the project they do not support, with the tradeoff being they might get the backers pledged amount if there isn't enough support from project supporters.

So to use the edge project as an example. A backer making the $20 level pledge could take a futures bet with me, as a naysayer, that the project won't reach its 50% funding goal by 3/4 of the way through the campaign. If the goal is reached, my $20 bet against the campaign becomes an additional $20 in the name of the backer who took my bet, aiding the project funding total. If the goal is unmet and ultimately the project is unfunded, I take the backer's original $20 pledge as market winnings. If the goal is unmet but there is a huge push at the end of the project campaign and the funding goal is met.. the futures bet is nullified, as the original money put at risk by the backer is taken to fund the project.

But for it to work reliably, it have to be part of the crowdsource pledging infrastructure itself for the site hosting the campaign to make sure pledged amounts flowed correctly and to keep naysayers honest when they lost.

-jef

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 23:48 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

But for it to work reliably, it have to be part of the crowdsource pledging infrastructure itself for the site hosting the campaign to make sure pledged amounts flowed correctly and to keep naysayers honest when they lost.

For that to work substantial percentage of backers need to want to participate in this totalizator.

Once pledged and made part of a naysayers market action, the backer's money is going to go somewhere..either to the project or to the naysayer.

Which turns the whole scheme on it's ear. Today crowdfunding works like a regular sale to the backer. Sure, you preorder things months in advance - but how is it different from sale in regular shop? I can go and buy items which will be released next year there, too - for example books or figurines. Manufacturer may decide to not release an item and then I'll not get it. Everything is the same with crowdfunding! It's different from the manufacturer's POV, but from the buyer - it's the same (well, except for the fancy titles... but regular shops sometimes do that, too). The basic principle still holds: either I pay the money and get the thing or I don't pay anything and don't get anything (except for fraud, but, again, it happens with regular shops, too). You offer means this fundamental principle is violated and now regular sale turns to some lottery. It may lead to opposite effect: there may be some naysayers who can provide an additional cash, but more rational people may decide not to participate instead!

It may be interesting to some backers, but it absolutely should be just a sideshow. I may decide to buy Ubuntu Edge, e.g., but I sure as hell don't want to send $600 (or $830 if I'll not decide soon) somewhere only to find out that I'll get nothing in return. Because I'm both backer and naysayer, you see: I'm pretty sure the goal is too ambitious and will not be met, but I may decide to participate anyway because if against all odds this campaign will succeed I'll have a nice shiny toy to play with (which also doubles as a decent phone) - this will be nice surprise.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 0:07 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

I'm thinking of the $20 level which has no tangible product associated with it. The chip-in-because-I-like-the-idea-and-the-dollar-amount-is-low-but-don't-expect-any-tangible-return-for-myself level.

A lot of projects have a chip-in level that represents feel-good supportor that represents minimal risk with very minimal or no return. That level could easily be naysayed.

I'd go further, I'd actually suggest that naysay transactions could stay within the project ecosystem so help encourage that feel-good low risk nickel-and-dime pledges to go towards other projects that the naysayer supports. Lets funnel supportor pledges and naysayer bets into projects with well scoped goals and enough support to be successful. Use naysayer money as multipliers to keep small dollar amount pledges from just going unspent when projects fail to meet their goals.

-jef

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 23:23 UTC (Mon) by jbrnd (guest, #92051) [Link] (5 responses)

I've been watching their funding over the last few hours and at the rate they're going, I'd predict they'll have at most $4.4 million when their day one offer expires (probably less, considering that it's now night in Europe and will soon be night in North America).

That's a very respectable amount of money raised in a short time, but I doubt they'll make it to 32 million. The $830 offer is considerably less attractive - I think they priced themselves out of the range where most people would be willing to contribute.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 23:28 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

they can always choose to extend the lower price point incentive.

What is interesting are the 30 odd numnber of people who have self-selected to pay the higher price instead of taking the one-day exclusive.

Those people, those people are true believers. Canonical needs to give those people special recognition for going above and beyond and choosing to pledge top dollar when the 1-day eclusive pre-order pricepoint is available. Those people Believe and that's gold for a marketing department.

-jef

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 3:15 UTC (Tue) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] (3 responses)

The day one offer is actually limited to 5000 devices, which adds up to $3 M. The've broken $3 M and are about to run out of the one day offer (it didn't add up exactly because some people funded the $20 level, some $830 early, and a few at the $10,000 level).

it will be interesting to see how well the momentum holds up after the early bird special expires. If it doesn't plummet, then they've got a pretty good chance of getting this funded.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 3:36 UTC (Tue) by qubit (guest, #57802) [Link] (2 responses)

> The've broken $3 M and are about to run out of the one day offer
>

I'm not sure about the "running out part". They got their 5000 orders a little while ago, but they don't seem to have cut people off yet -- the sidebar is currently listing "5032 out of 5000 claimed"!

Oops!

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 4:00 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

that could be a problem. It'll be interesting to see how they handle that if say they overshoot by several hundred or more. Do they honor those additional exclusives that roll in in the next 12 hours?

Having 10k pre-orders on the book on the first day at the 600 price point would look pretty good, especially if the goal of this campaign is primarily to prove pre-order interest to sway commercial partners and not to actually get funded.

-jef

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 4:19 UTC (Tue) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link]

I suspect that it lets people who are in the middle of checking out continue to check out, even if it goes a little over. It won't likely last all that much longer now that that level has sold out.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 8:49 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

This is also dicussed on Hacker News, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084099

I haven't read all the comments (too many new ones since I last checked it. However, someone claimed to be a Canonical employee and said they have "centuries of hardware experience", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6085410.

I hope they reach their funding goal. I personally hope it'll run Wayland in the end, but at the moment it is way more nice to have more free (as in freedom) phones.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 18:41 UTC (Mon) by sensor (guest, #91930) [Link] (1 responses)

Great, another Ubuntu vaporware device...

If Shuttleworth would shave, maybe he would find real investors instead of 1024 chicken.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 9:11 UTC (Tue) by ersi (guest, #64521) [Link]

I would have preferred if you did not post this at all, considering how it's only bashing Canonical/Ubuntu and/or Mark Shuttleworth.
Please consider that you're partaking in a public forum and derogatory comments may be personally hurtful for you in the future as well as currently for your targets.

To make this little side-thread actually worth anything: Could you at least enlighten us of the other devices they've tried to pursue, promised and never delivered?

Respectfully,
ersi

Slightly OT: Dedicated phones for dedicated OSes?

Posted Jul 22, 2013 19:22 UTC (Mon) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] (2 responses)

I wish them luck and success with this exciting project!

I wonder, however, whether dedicated phones for dedicated operating systems (and vice versa) are a desirable future. The fair-phone, scheduled for this autumn, will be open (at least, AFAIK) for any operating system, including Ubuntu. If Canonical likes to create an even more powerful device, the better, but maybe it should be advertised as "open for any operating system" from the start, attracting more people.

Slightly OT: Dedicated phones for dedicated OSes?

Posted Jul 22, 2013 20:07 UTC (Mon) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link] (1 responses)

Fairphone looks interesting. This is the first I've heard of it, I'm surprised LWN hasn't made any noise about it (yet).

Slightly OT: Dedicated phones for dedicated OSes?

Posted Jul 23, 2013 14:47 UTC (Tue) by jwakely (guest, #60262) [Link]

It's been mentioned in comments, but not often. I have one on order and am looking forward to it.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 19:31 UTC (Mon) by aliguori (guest, #30636) [Link] (1 responses)

I thought the SEC recently approved equity crowd funding. It's a pity that this took the kickstarter approach of overpriced prizes vs. offering true equity.

I would love to invest in something like this provided it came with equity vs. an overpriced phone.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 22:42 UTC (Mon) by jebba (guest, #4439) [Link]

The SEC lifted the ban on general solicitation, but still only accredited investors can invest. This explains it well:

http://www.fundable.com/blog/sec-general-solicitation-inf...

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 21:05 UTC (Mon) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (7 responses)

As a happy owner of Samsung ARM Chromebook that I use for Java/C++/JavaScript development via https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton (it uses Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot) I think Ubuntu overstated the power required to run a desktop.

Also, for any input beyond short emails one needs a real keyboard. But if one need to carry a keyboard, why a high-end phone plus a keyboard is any better than a cheap phone and a cheap while thin and light Chromebook that in addition gives 11 inches of screen estate?

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 8:17 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (6 responses)

Exactly. Someone who wants a really productive mobile phone is someone on the move who would not want to hunt for HDMI monitors and keyboards everywhere. It would make sense with a really lightweight laptop dock -- but such things have been tried (Motorola Atrix, Asus Padfone) and have not been a success.

I actually have "convergence" in my Galaxy Note 8 with a keyboard case -- it runs a Linux desktop nicely in a chroot and the screen is big enough to work on. I can even VNC into my work desktop if I want. So it's my laptop, tablet, e-reader in one. (I did the same thing before with an older 10" android tablet.) The Note 8 can also make/receive phone calls, but that would look sort of ridiculous, so I use a separate device as my phone.

Moto Atrix problem

Posted Jul 23, 2013 9:28 UTC (Tue) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link] (1 responses)

was cost - $500 for the phone, another $500 for the dock. If the dock had been $150-$200, they would have sold a ton of them (IMHO). However, when the screen/keyboard alone costs what a good laptop costs, many people decided to buy a laptop instead.

Moto Atrix problem

Posted Jul 23, 2013 20:41 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

Yep. This is what really puzzles me. Samsung Arm Chromebook is a perfect netbook hardware wise IMO. It is cheap (250 USD), silent (no fan), thin and light, has good keyboard and connectivity (dual-band wireless, USB2/USB3/HDMI/SD card ports). The 11 inch screen is mate and readable outdoors and the battery lasts over 5 hours.

The only problem is ChromeOS that it runs making it unusable for many tasks. But that can be fixed with installing in one way or another a Linux distribution.

So why cannot Ubuntu (or anybody else) create a similar ARM netbook with normal Linux and apps ecosystem and supply a mobile app for Android/IPhone etc. that allows transparently synchronize with most latest phones and tether through their network connections?

I failed to see how the expensive device that Ubuntu develops (essentially a phone+dock) would be any better than this phone/netbook combination that one could get for less than 300 USD (cheapest phones that allow tethering and support 3G is bellow 50 USD).

Not on your ear

Posted Jul 23, 2013 20:10 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

The Note 8 can also make/receive phone calls, but that would look sort of ridiculous

Just curious: have you tried earphones? A bluetooth headset could also work fine.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 27, 2013 0:45 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (2 responses)

The Note 8 can also make/receive phone calls, but that would look sort of ridiculous

It certainly can't be as ridiculous-looking as this!

☺

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 27, 2013 3:52 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe if I get trousers with larger pockets that will fit the Note 8, I can consider it.. (@man_ls, no, I don't think I'll do the bluetooth route)

Awkward appearance reconsidered...

Posted Jul 28, 2013 16:55 UTC (Sun) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

In retrospect, making calls with the Note 8 might indeed look unusually awkward (scroll down to 2nd image in review).

At least with the Motorola "brick phone", the user appeared über-high tech for the times. 25 years ago, of course. ;-)

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 22, 2013 21:56 UTC (Mon) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (26 responses)

One one hand, I love it, and I may well fund it.

On the other hand, as an ex-OLPC-er, my reaction is: hardware is HARD, on so many levels. Ubuntu does not have the organizational know-how.

Who is running the hardware side? At what level are you outsourcing, and who is managing it on your side? What know-how do they bring to the table? What leverage do you have with the OEM/ODM? How about other players in the supply chain?

And if you are going to do this via an Indiegogo campaign, do you understand the business logistics of hardware certification? Of EU recycling? Of power supplies?

Their FAQ does not list "What countries will you ship to?" -- that's a red flag right there. Together with the timeframes.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as negative. I may well put money down for one -- will think it through tonight. But hardware is a completely different business from software. Please show me you understand that :-)

(Are you a software-head and curious? Go read Bunnie's blog, end to end -- http://www.bunniestudios.com/ )

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 22, 2013 23:09 UTC (Mon) by jhhaller (guest, #56103) [Link] (25 responses)

Lots of issues:
Safety certification (UL/CSA/CE Mark aspects/...) This is needed both for the power supply and the device itself
Environmental hazardous substance bans
Recycling fees (like in California)
Actual recycling (like in Europe)
Radio certification, both WiFi and cell frequencies and non-interference
Carrier certification
Warranty coverage/local repair centers and terms which vary by country
How is voice being done with an LTE-only device - VoLTE, Google Voice?
Which LTE frequencies will be covered?
Sales tax/VAT - some countries allow importer to pay this, others require a single distributor in each country to pay this. Otherwise your device may get stuck in customs.
Export/import classification for a number of countries - what happens if someone from North Korea tries to buy one - there is probably enough US content to prohibit it.
While power supplies can adapt to different voltage/frequency, different plugs are needed for each country. The power supplies are typically the most sensitive for safety regulations.
Non-uniformity of country laws - China prohibits full disk encryption - what unique laws may affect product?

Charging only an extra $30 to ship outside US/Europe makes me think Canonical doesn't understand how much getting certifications from multiple countries/carriers will cost, or will leave the risk of not being certified to the purchaser.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 22, 2013 23:37 UTC (Mon) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link]

Exactly. And the list goes on and on.

If you don't have real hardware-heads on board and in-house, it's a nightmare. My hat goes off to the actual hardware people in OLPC, from whom I learned so much.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 22, 2013 23:44 UTC (Mon) by hamjudo (guest, #363) [Link] (16 responses)

As long as 10 watts is enough, there are many off the shelf chargers to choose from. So they don't need to certify their own.

The rest of the stuff on your list seems more daunting.

The chosen battery is a very new design. That will be hard to get approved and made in volume, unless it is also adopted by some larger projects.

They also chose a screen technology that isn't shipping in high volume yet. That is another thing to be concerned about. I'm not willing to bet against them succeeding, but they've got a lot of work to go. I hope they have a plan B for the screen and for the batteries, if their chosen options don't pan out.

The one day deal is also limited to 5000 people. They may hit the 5000 limit, before the time limit.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 0:23 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (15 responses)

The chosen battery is a very new design. That will be hard to get approved and made in volume...

They also chose a screen technology that isn't shipping in high volume yet.

And that's the whole point of the exercise! Sure, you'll need approvals but you most definitely don't need to build it "in volume" for an exclusive production run, available only through Indiegogo!

I hope they have a plan B for the screen and for the batteries, if their chosen options don't pan out.

They do. That's why Specifications are subject to change. But it's much easier to plan when you know exactly how many components you need to buy and have money eight months in advance. The worst that can happen (on the assumption that project will be funded in the end) is that they will need to spend more money then they'll receive from backers. This will not be good outcome, I guess, but I doubt they will miss target so much that Ubuntu will become bankrupt over this project.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 0:57 UTC (Tue) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (14 responses)

The problem is that OEMs/ODMs don't take you seriously unless you are building in large scale. So for small scale, look at perhaps thousand per device -- so you can get access to the production line at an ODM that does small volumes. But forget about leverage with suppliers.

And the investment in certification and related paperwork for N number of countries... just does not make any sense.

If your battery is special, you may not even be able to ship it. Batteries pack a ton of energy in a small package (some say as much as a grenade) and can be unstable. So there are restrictions on airfreight. Ship by boat and wait 3+ months.

Some countries will not let you import devices without chargers; and are really anal about charger certification.

There's a zillion details like these. Each of them can be overcome... each of them at some cost in manpower, calendar time and cash. But often you suffer a thousand very expensive cuts _even when you have folks with a ton of hw experience involved_.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 2:21 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

If that's all so problematic then how could Trolltech ship Greenphone, then how could FIC ship Neo 1973 and how could dozens of small Chineese-based companies ship millions of devices around the world?

Somehow it's hard to reconcile the world where something is both positively, totally, absolutely impossible and is done routinely by huge number of guys.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 2:45 UTC (Tue) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not impossible. As I said, shipping small volumes worldwide makes no sense economically; but you can try.

But there is a simple and reasonable path: you just do the paperwork and ship to a handful of wealthy countries, that's where the money is, and "worldwide" sounds good for marketing :-) . Orders from elsewhere, you decline or refund orders -- or if you don't mind the risk, you just ship it and ignore the complaints if it gets lost.

There's one barrier that is also worth mentioning: outside of OECD, it's often hard to obtain credit cards, and even harder to use them to make purchases overseas. That is a pretty effective filter too.

IOWs, "worldwide" to online electronic retailers usually means OECD. As an ex-OLPC, it means something quite "wider" to me :-)

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 3:02 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

or, if it's small quantities, you accept small losses (or decreased margin) on shipping to the more out of the way locations rather than complicate the marketing/pricing.

In any case, I think this is far less about fund-raising than it is about marketing, making sure the new device gets out to a lot of people in a hurry.

With this approach they get a large number of people around the world eager to show off their new phone, a lot of press around it, and mostly (if not completely) cover their costs.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 6:24 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

FIC were already making mobile phones, yet look how long the Neo 1973 actually took - and how many hardware revisions were needed. Did Openmoko ever ship a version of that themselves that actually worked well?

I think the comments about Canonical not being in a position to do this are spot-on, making mobile phones is extremely hard. They're sticking a lot of new tech in this phone, and some of it looks relatively necessary (eg, can they really power all that ram/screen/etc. with standard li-ion?). It's a nice design but it's a lot of risk, and they're planning to do a production run within ten months.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 8:11 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (9 responses)

Ship by boat and wait 3+ months.

Why? The transit time is not 3 months (e.g. China->Europe). Where is all this time coming from? I can easily determine the transit time if you tell me which place this is coming from and going to.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 13:27 UTC (Tue) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (8 responses)

3 months is a rule of thumb from ex works China to customs dock at destination port, with some padding for pickup from ex-works, delivery to ship, the odd port closure due to storm, strike, etc.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 19:04 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (2 responses)

IMO, it seems you were lied to or you really used some bad carrier/forwarder (MSC?). The transit time for China -> Europe should be around 1 month or so (vessel, not any inland bit). After the container arrives at destination, you have to pay per day if you don't pick it up or hand it back empty on time. I'm guessing you didn't fill the entire container yourself, so I'm guessing you used some forwarder and the forwarder just didn't have enough space/capacity (either enough to fill a container or reserved space on the vessel) and told you some lies. Or maybe total lack of experience (though forwarder should be able to handle that for you).

Note: Above applies to China->Europe or China->North America. Africa has "TIA" abbreviation ("This Is Africa" is often enough as explanation :P).

Bad forwarder example (friend shared his experience): some forwarder took ages to actually ship some household goods from Latin America to Europe. All kinds of stupid reasons were given to explain the delay. When that person had enough and told the forwarder to stop making up stories and that he was working in the shipping industry the forwarder shut up and the household goods were shipped in the same week. Household goods are actually things that can be held up by customs for a while (at destination). But electronics? I unfortunately only know how it is handled for big companies, but there isn't too much delay.

You do have port closures due to storm, but those are somewhat predictable. Strike means you're shipping to France :P (occurs very regularly in that country, though usually strikes are pre-announced and they're dealt with).

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 26, 2013 8:33 UTC (Fri) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (1 responses)

Is it really true there are never strikes outside of France?

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 26, 2013 9:55 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

No, it is just that the rest is a rounding error in comparison. Lately it seems way better, but strike in France at one time (I kept track of it for 6 months) occurred *at least* every other week, while there aren't that many vessel calls to France. In France they go on strike for reasons not related to their employer, e.g. to protest against the government. In most other countries (talking only about North Europe, Mediterranean area is different), the strikes occur during salary negotiations (strike is related to the employer). If you're a bit insightful as a company you keep track of when terminals are doing their negotiations and ask beforehand if they expect difficulties or not. You also of course have strikes elsewhere, but e.g. North Europe it seems more like power play (in my impression).

This all my opinion, not on behalf of anyone.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 22:05 UTC (Tue) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link] (4 responses)

According to a recent NY Times article total transit time from factory in China to warehouse in Netherlands is 5 weeks by sea, 3 weeks by rail, and 1 week by air.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 22:42 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

It's possible to get faster train transit, though not much faster.

However their shipping time estimation is definitely on the optimistic side.

In our experience its more like 8-10 weeks to get a shipment from China to Germany. It also depends on the demand for shipping - if demand is high then shipowners often increase the speed of the ships. It increases the amount of wear and fuel used, but creates additional capacity.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 23:01 UTC (Tue) by andrel (guest, #5166) [Link]

Yes, those numbers are for a large multinational with a dedicated team of expediters. For most shippers it will take longer.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 24, 2013 2:56 UTC (Wed) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (1 responses)

Yep 8-10 weeks is my experience as well. What they promise is of little relevance, it always ends up taking at least 8w.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 24, 2013 4:07 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I've seen 3-4 weeks repeatedly, including from small companies that haven't done it before. It's not impossible. It does take doing some planning ahead of time (during the time that the product is being produced)

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 0:16 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

Radio certification, both WiFi and cell frequencies and non-interference.

These are important, yes - but looks like they are thinking about it: before launch we will conduct interoperability testing with networks in Europe, the US, South America, China, India, the Middle East and Africa - it'll be silly to spend so much effort testing it in India and Middle East and then not certify it there, right?

Carrier certification.

WTH is that and why do you need it?

Warranty coverage/local repair centers and terms which vary by country.

But then all these laws are only applicable if you actually have someone in said country. Otherwise the worst that can happen is that phone will be stopped on the border and you'll be forced to issue a refund.

How is voice being done with an LTE-only device - VoLTE, Google Voice?

That's not an LTE-only device. LTE-only devices don't work in all countries that provide GSM/3G/LTE-based network services.

Sales tax/VAT - some countries allow importer to pay this, others require a single distributor in each country to pay this. Otherwise your device may get stuck in customs.

And buyer will go and get it from customs. Somehow it's not a problem for seven-person team of Xiaomi or similarly-sized team of Meizu, but huge problem for relatively large company like Canonical? Puhleaze.

While power supplies can adapt to different voltage/frequency, different plugs are needed for each country.

There are an even easier solution: don't provide power supply at all. Power supply for any smartphone (or even your laptop) will work. Or provide US plug and add bunch of plugs to it. Again: there are tons of manufacturers who'll gladly supply you with power adapters in China.

Charging only an extra $30 to ship outside US/Europe makes me think Canonical doesn't understand how much getting certifications from multiple countries/carriers will cost, or will leave the risk of not being certified to the purchaser.

As someone who uses non-certified-it-my-country phone for couple of years I can say: it works just fine without any certification if it actually complies with standards.

I think you are confusing things: you are thinking about "worldwide distribution via usual channels" and Canonical thinks about an exclusive production run, available only through Indiegogo. Totally different goals with totally different set of requirements.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 1:10 UTC (Tue) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (4 responses)

> it'll be silly to spend so much effort testing it in India and Middle East and then not certify it there, right?

Interop testing is very different from certification! Costs, paperwork, lead times...

> buyer will go and get it from customs

Nope. That only works _of the customer is at the port of entry!_ and in many cases custom will not release it.

It is simple. If you don't do certifications and related paperwork (ie: recycling for EU) you will have devices held up at customs. Maybe some get through, but it's an expensive bet to take.

The companies you list seem to be manufacturing in China and selling in China. That's easy -- only one market to certify, and planning to make and sell in large scale.

What is hard, costly and time-consuming is certifying and doing all related paperwork for many different countries. It makes sense if you're planning to sell a large number in each country you certify for.

And some countries/regions are just complicated and expensive. For example, electronics are expensive in EU... and now I know why: the manufacturer/importer has to pay a significant recycling fee and make arrangements for recycling. The barriers to entry are very high.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 2:03 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

The companies you list seem to be manufacturing in China and selling in China.

Nope. They are manufacturing in China yet ship worldwide. Here is Xiaomi and here is Meizu. They are quite popular in India and Russia, for example.

For example, electronics are expensive in EU... and now I know why: the manufacturer/importer has to pay a significant recycling fee and make arrangements for recycling. The barriers to entry are very high.

Sure, but this is one of the worst offenders and since they offer free shipping in UK I think EU is covered. And US is covered explicitly. This means that most problematic countries are covered already, so what's left? Japan? Yes, this can be a problem, but I doubt there will be many orders from Japan. Some other countries (North Korea?) will probably not be covered and they'll be forced to offer a refund, but I think they'll be able to send these phones to most countries.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 2:15 UTC (Tue) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link]

Well they are aiming for volume. So they've certified and done legal legwork for the markets they care about.

I call bs on the "ship worldwide". I am certain they won't ship to many locations in Africa, south pacific or Argentina, just to name a few. OECD is not the world.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 8:24 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

You're showing DX.com. That is not Xiaomi. Anyone can resell anything there. Quite obvious as it is just one very outdated model from Xiaomi.

From their FAQ:

The customs and import issues including any taxes,tariffs and item seizures are the sole responsibility of the customers. Invoices are never included in the package. Hong Kong warehouse items and international warehouse items are not subject to any export taxes.

Regarding the package declaration, orders shipped with airmail use the product category for the description.

I have ordered from dx.com various times and usually things are EC-certified (or maybe they faked the logo :P). Still, it clearly says that for customs things, you're on your own.

Maybe you have a point. Just that DX.com is not a good example.

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 28, 2013 11:48 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

If you by "EC-Certified" you mean the CE mark, note that is a self-certification of applicable standards being met. So it's not at all difficult to get...

Problems with hardware

Posted Jul 23, 2013 2:02 UTC (Tue) by heijo (guest, #88363) [Link]

Hopefully the device is not LTE-only, since that would make it unusable outside of major cities which are the only places where LTE is available in many countries.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 1:58 UTC (Tue) by heijo (guest, #88363) [Link] (29 responses)

4.5" 1280x720 screen makes this device unusable.

It needs at least 5" 1920x1080 since that's what the Samsung Galaxy S4 has.

As it is, the Samsung Galaxy S5 that will ship next year (like this device) is likely to be strictly better than this device (except possibly for internal storage vs micro-SD), making it useless.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 2:51 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (17 responses)

5" is too large for some people, and they talk about the resolution, and I don't find it unreasonable to make the statement that 300 dpi is good enough, and that higher resolution is mostly just decreased battery life (the screeen power consumption and the processing needed for the extra pixels)

At some point, the idea of a super high resolution screen with small dimensions really doesn't make sense.Is that point 300 dpi? if not, what is that point?

300 dpi is the point where printed material is considered 'good enough' for professional use (I remember quite well when it became possible to buy home printers that could do 300 dpi)

take a look at this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_de... and see where 300 dpi fits in.

The kindle with it's "great" screen is only 167 dpi, most desktop/laptop displays are around 100 dpi, with their "retina" displays (supposedly the limits of human eyesight according to their marketing) around 220-260 dpi

I carry three devices around with me all the time. a Kindle DX (9.7" 150 dpi), a Nexus 10 (10" 300 dpi), and a HTC One (4.7" 468 dpi). I would MUCH rather read on either my Nexus or my Kindle than on the HTC.

It's going to be interesting to see if they can do this, or if the "higher numbers are better" marketing hurts them. Unfortunately, I don't have the money to try this right now.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 12:30 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (guest, #49613) [Link] (1 responses)

> At some point, the idea of a super high resolution screen with small dimensions really doesn't make sense.Is that point 300 dpi? if not, what is that point?

That depends on eye acuity and viewing distance, and the relevant figure isn't really ppi (pixels per inch), but ppd (pixels per degree of arc).

Normal eye acuity (aka 20/20 vision) is defined as being able to distinguish between two lines at an angular distance of 1 arc minute, which equates to 60 ppd. The visual acuity required to get a drivers license in most jurisdictions is half that (aka 20/40 vision), and perfect vision (the best possible vision for a human) is four times that (aka 20/5 vision).

Viewing distance obviously vary from person to person, and occasion to occasion, but there are some generally accepted "typical" values for different device classes: 3.0 meters for TVs, 1.0 meters for desktop monitors, 0.7 meters for laptops, 0.5 meters for tablets, e-book readers and netbooks, and 0.3 meters for phones and music players.

As a reference, an angular pixel density of 60 / 240 ppd at those distance is equivalent to the following relative pixel densities:
3.0 m: 29 / 116 ppi
1.0 m: 87 / 349 ppi
0.7 m: 125 / 499 ppi
0.5 m: 175 / 699 ppi
0.3 m: 292 / 1164 ppi

Calculating the angular pixel density at the corresponding "typical" viewing distance for each Apple's Retina® display, we get 67 ppd for iPhone®/iPod®, 91 ppd for iPad®, and 106-109 ppd for MacBook® Pro. Thus the iPhone® and iPod® Retina® displays are good enough for a "normal" person using it at a "typical" viewing distance, but with very little margin for people with good vision or people holding the phone unusually near themselves. The iPad® and MacBook® Pro displays should, however, suffice for most people most of the time, even though they are not nearly good enough for everyone at all times.

The proposed Ubuntu Edge phone would have a relative pixel density of 326 ppi, equivalent to an angular pixel density of 67 ppd at a typical viewing distance of 0.3 m, the same as the iPhone® Retina® display. Whether that is "good enough" is up to you...

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 17:29 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Note that visual acuity depends on exactly how you measure it. There are certain setups that result in someone demonstrating hyperacuity - I recall from my days in TV being shown that (using two different acuity test patterns), our group of engineers varied between 0.25 arc minutes and 2 arc minutes of acuity, and yet when the demonstrator used a different pattern (a vernier IIRC), the group moved to between 0.05 arc seconds and 0.5 arc seconds.

This makes judging the required resolution of a display very hard, because of the hyperacuity effect; in an ideal world, I'd have a pixel every 0.01 arc seconds, and the hardware to drive it. In the real world, I'll hardly ever see the difference between that and a pixel every 60 arc seconds.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 13:31 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (14 responses)

>The kindle with it's "great" screen is only 167 dpi, most desktop/laptop displays are around 100 dpi

>I would MUCH rather read on either my Nexus or my Kindle than on the HTC

I would also rather read on the Kindle[0], but that has much more to do with contrast and lighting than the density of the display.

Bear in mind that the Kindle uses hand-hinted fonts specifically designed to maximise legibility on that specific screen at the specific font sizes available.

Additionally, the fact that it's a monochrome display eliminates all possibility of colour fringing which is usually the first noticeable artifact of a too-low density display, and means that they can't be tempted to use the abominable sub-pixel font destruction that's so trendy these days amongst people who want their text to look like rainbow-coloured shit.

In short, it's not a fair comparison at all :P.

[0] I have a Paperwhite, which is somewhat higher dpi, because I tried the previous models and didn't consider them acceptable.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 14:17 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (12 responses)

Sorry, that was a little harsh - sub-pixel font rendering is basically my 'berserk button', that makes me immediately stressed and angry just contemplating it.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 19:37 UTC (Tue) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link]

> sub-pixel font rendering is basically my 'berserk button'

Then these will either make you explode, or humor you with absurdity:
http://distractionware.com/blog/2008/04/sub-pixel-message...
http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 24, 2013 10:16 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (10 responses)

> sub-pixel font rendering is basically my 'berserk button', that makes me immediately stressed and angry just contemplating it.

I know how you feel. It *may* make sense on very-high-dpi displays but it just looks butt-ugly on anything I use. There are some things in KDE that insist on using sub-pixel rendering (tooltips on the task bar, mostly) despite me forbidding it and I don't know how to fix it and it drives me nuts.

I wish sub-pixel rendering was never invented.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 24, 2013 13:13 UTC (Wed) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (8 responses)

The technology is fine, it's just generally not correctly implemented.

If you think about it, a typical display looks like this:

RGBRGBRGB, etc.

There's basically no human discernable difference between drawing a white pixel surrounded by black pixels by doing activating the above pattern with sequence 000fff000 meaning the middle RGB is activated vs. doing 008ffe000 which simply shifts the activation pattern one subpixel to the left. I lied, though. There's usually a slight black margin around each full RGB triplet, but I haven't found it to matter in practice.

Anyway, against this background subpixel rendering makes perfect sense. Where the implementations usually go wrong is that people are too lazy to care to get gamma correction and (in case of Linux) LCD bitmap filtering just right. When partially covered pixels are encountered, the OVER operator should be evaluated in linear light or coloration of the end result is likely. The LCD filtering should be simple 3-subpixel moving average so that every subpixel gets equal excitation and the result is colorless.

I hope that people start to use linear light color spaces such as scRGB(16), or sRGB texture and framebuffer support to allow linear blending to occur in linear light.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 24, 2013 15:41 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (7 responses)

>There's basically no human discernable difference between drawing a white pixel surrounded by black pixels by doing activating the above pattern with sequence 000fff000 meaning the middle RGB is activated vs. doing 008ffe000 which simply shifts the activation pattern one subpixel to the left. I lied, though. There's usually a slight black margin around each full RGB triplet, but I haven't found it to matter in practice.

True - in that example the total colour output for any rectangle of three subpixels is the same. In simplified form for 3-bit pixels:

xxx|000|000|111|000|xxx shifted to
xxx|000|001|110|000|xxx
can be viewed as if it were
xxx|x00|000|111|000|0xx
by shifting what we consider the boundary lines.

>Anyway, against this background subpixel rendering makes perfect sense.

No it doesn't. It's different to your example above because you're not just shifting the boundary line:
xxx|x00|000|111|000|0xx definitely will *not* look the same as
xxx|x00|000|110|001|0xx
Even assuming everything is correctly gamma corrected, it is fundamentally a mistake to change the balance of colours emitted within a 3-subpixel block[0], so that the overall hue in that block is objectively incorrect, in the assumption that people won't notice or care about that inaccuracy.

It *is* of course true that the eye's ability to resolve colours is far less than its ability to resolve intensity, but that does not lead to the conclusion that we can just mess with the colours willy-nilly, at least not until we've reached the point where the pixel density is so high that it is literally impossible to discern them. By that point, there's really no need for subpixel rendering anyway.

And besides, however you do it, this is a problem which is insoluble in the general case. Whatever is attempting to render *must* know *for certain* what the pixel arrangement is physically *at this moment* *per pixel*. In many cases, this is logically impossible - think about mirrored heterogeneous output devices for example.

And you can forget about ever taking a screenshot and expecting it to look good on another display if it's BGR, or Pentile, or has horizontal pixels, or...

Anyone here have 3 monitors in PLP configuration? Good luck getting sub-pixel rendering on that.

The only way it could be sanely implemented is for every rendering pipeline to supersample such that 3x3 pixels are generated for every one in the output device[1], and it is then downsampled with antialiasing applied at the final stage before display. Since that would require rendering nine times as many pixels, it's never likely to happen - and that's ignoring the question of Pentile or other exotic display schemes.

It's a hack. A dirty, nasty, ugly, cheap disgusting hack that happens to work for some people on some devices in certain situations, but which makes the situation *enormously worse* in those situations where it doesn't work, which is a lot of them.

[0] As distinct from simply 'a pixel' because of the boundary shifting which leaves the result practically the same

[1] It would need to be 3x3 rather than 3x1 because it might end up going to an output device with horizontal pixels where it would need 1x3.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 24, 2013 16:09 UTC (Wed) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link] (1 responses)

> No it doesn't. It's different to your example above because you're not just shifting the boundary line:
> xxx|x00|000|111|000|0xx definitely will *not* look the same as
> xxx|x00|000|110|001|0xx
> Even assuming everything is correctly gamma corrected, it is fundamentally a mistake to change the balance of colours emitted within a 3-subpixel block[0], so that the overall hue in that block is objectively incorrect, in the assumption that people won't notice or care about that inaccuracy.

I don't understand what you mean here, I don't think anyone proposed shifting pixels in that manner. That's what would happen if you thought a screen was RGB and it was really BGR. Certainly nobody would argue that _incorrect_ subpixel rendering is OK.

> Anyone here have 3 monitors in PLP configuration? Good luck getting sub-pixel rendering on that.

I do, and so I turn subpixel rendering off. Maybe someday software will support it, as you mention, but it's just unusable right now.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 25, 2013 10:21 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>I don't understand what you mean here, I don't think anyone proposed shifting pixels in that manner.

Sorry, I was trying to point out that the example given by the GP wasn't describing the same situation as sub-pixel rendering, without spending ages going into details with specific examples etc. I didn't describe what I meant very well, but I don't really think it's worth going into.

Suffice it to say that I've never seen sub-pixel rendering work consistently well at normal monitor densities and distances, although some of the best examples look okay if I'm leaning back in my chair at home (where I have a large monitor and tend to sit further back).

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 25, 2013 9:07 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (4 responses)

I also realized that I wrote my example incorrectly, somehow mixing implied nybble activation energy with just 1 bit of activation mask. My example should probably have been written just 000111000 and 001110000. In any case I think you got it.

You are correct in that the subpixel image is not portable across displays, but to me it's a hugely beneficial hack and that justifies its usage. Almost every frame is rendered to a display with known properties, so there's no point to construct a hugely elaborate scheme for the odd chance that the rendering targets multiple different cases, especially as it would be prohibitively expensive.

I made a few sample renderings with approximation of gamma correction called alpha correction a few months back for horizontal RGB screens:

https://bel.fi/alankila/lcd/lwns.png (alpha correction with truetype slight hinting)
https://bel.fi/alankila/lcd/lwnu.png (alpha correction with unhinted text)
https://bel.fi/alankila/lcd/lwn.png (alpha correction with hinted text)

This is just to show that color fringing doesn't have to happen with subpixel rendering, though alpha correction being an approximation is generally only some factor of 10 better than the usual linux rendering with respect to the color error. One other observation to be made is that black gamma corrected glyphs are narrower than people are used to.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 25, 2013 10:24 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

>I made a few sample renderings with approximation of gamma correction called alpha correction a few months back for horizontal RGB screens

Horizontal RGB as-in horizontal pixels, or as-in horizontal arrangement of vertical pixels?

Either way I'll try to remember to take a look at it on both later.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 25, 2013 18:58 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

Well... err, I'm a bit confused by your question. The image was constructed for a screen where, if you take a magnifying glass to your screen, you should see each pixel to be composed of approximately 1/3 width subpixels in RGB order.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 29, 2013 10:44 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, I said 'pixels', when I meant to say 'sub-pixels' - ie. in this case a horizontal arrangement of vertical subpixels.

Anyway, of those three examples, the third is by far the least objectionable, but still I wouldn't want to be stuck reading it for any length of time.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 29, 2013 18:08 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Anyway, of those three examples, the third is by far the least objectionable, but still I wouldn't want to be stuck reading it for any length of time.

Interesting. I find lwns.png to be the easiest to read. lwnu.png is fuzzy and in lwn.png I think the letters are too thin. I do agree that none are stellar though.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 25, 2013 12:03 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

If you've never examined text on a Mac laptop with OSX, I'd recommend doing so before writing off subpixel AA completely. Yes, even on a normal dpi non-"retina" model.

I agree that it generally looks terrible on Linux, but if it's implemented right, and has proper display calibration, it can look great.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 18:49 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I thought my Sony PRS T1 had an okay display but I could see the pixels when reading without glasses (being near-sighted, I would have it at about ten cm from my eyes in that case...). My Kobo Aura is pretty well near perfect. Though, of course, the beautiful letter-press from my early C19 collected works of Byron is a different thing altogether :P

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 4:55 UTC (Tue) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link]

"Unusable"? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Many of us have used much smaller and lower resolution devices quite happily. As an owner of a Nexus 4, I'm perfectly happy with its 1280x768 4.7" screen; a 1280x720 4.5" screen is pretty comparable. A 5" screen would likely be too big for me. You don't need 1920x1080 on a 4.5" screen; it just doesn't appreciably increase the quality.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 7:23 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

My first thought: BS!
It might be unusable for you, because you might have some strange condition, but normal human beings are able to use smartphones with 2,8 inch screens and a 320x240 resolution.
720p at 4.5' is perfectly fine for nearly everybody unless something is wrong with you.

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 23, 2013 8:32 UTC (Tue) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (8 responses)

So long as the angle subtended by each pixel at the position of your eye isn't too much more than the lower limit of human visual acuity, it benefits visually not a whit to have more pixels. A 300dpi screen at 12 inches from the eyes is 0.95 minutes of arc per pixel, and the very best acuity of a healthy person in optimal conditions is around 0.6 minutes of arc.

Screen contrast ratio and colour accuracy in the presence of ambient light, reflections etc become far more important considerations for typical screens.

But what I'm wondering is: the Ubuntu Edge is also supposed to dock into and drive a standard monitor. What will be the screen resolution driving ability for an external monitor? I can't see any hints in the spec.

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 23, 2013 11:10 UTC (Tue) by heijo (guest, #88363) [Link] (1 responses)

20/20 vision means you can separate two lines 1 arcminute apart, which means 0.5 arcminutes per pixel, or 0.25 arcminutes assuming vision twice better than normal, which some people have.

So, since 180*60/0.25 = 43200, the optimal theoretical non-uniform planar screen is a 43200x43200 screen, where the peripheral pixels are enlarged to support almost 180 degree FOV (excluding the last pixel that would require an infinite screen).

If one wants uniform pixel size and limited FOV, display size needs to multiplied by (2 * tan_deg (fov_degrees/2))/pi

For example, 120x120 degree FOV gives 47634x47634 size (would be rounded up to 48000x48000), while FPS standard 90x60 degree FOV gives 27502x15879 (would be rounded up to 28800x16200).

Thus, at 12 inch = 1 foot distance, 120x120 FOV with 40/20 vision requires approx. a square 60" 48000x48000 800 dpi screen, while 90x60 FOV requires approx. a 16:9 40" 28800x16200 800 dpi screen.

Now on a phone it's hard to focus on the screen when holding it close enough to the eyes to obtain desktop-like FOV values, so maybe one could get by with less, but still those resolutions would eventually be required to support desktop-sized video files without loss.

We have a long way to go, we are not even close to optimal screens.

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 23, 2013 13:29 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (guest, #49613) [Link]

> 20/20 vision means you can separate two lines 1 arcminute apart, which means 0.5 arcminutes per pixel
Actually "20/20 vision" means you can separate two lines *at a distance of* 1 arc minute, meaning the space *between* the lines is 1 arc minute, and thus means 1.0 arc minute per pixel, not 0.5 arc minutes.

That said, a rare few people have four times the normal eye acuity, meaning that your figures are correct for someone with 80/20 (aka 20/5) vision, but those people are so rare that catering to them makes no economic sense, so halve all your figures and they'll be correct for someone with 40/20 (aka 20/10) vision. Though a 120/120 FoV *phone* makes very little sense to me...

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 23, 2013 13:18 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (5 responses)

>So long as the angle subtended by each pixel at the position of your eye isn't too much more than the lower limit of human visual acuity, it benefits visually not a whit to have more pixels. A 300dpi screen at 12 inches from the eyes is 0.95 minutes of arc per pixel, and the very best acuity of a healthy person in optimal conditions is around 0.6 minutes of arc.

This is Appple's marketing blurb, but in fact it's not true in practice.

Eyes have a finite resolution of course, but they are constantly making micro-movements which you are largely unaware of on a conscious level, and which serve to increase the effective resolution beyond what you could expect from a purely static imaging device with the same number of sensors.

Now bear in mind that, when using a phone, you commonly hold it a lot less than a foot from your eyes, and something more like 600 dpi looks like a reasonable target to aim for.

All that said though, my phone has around 250dpi, and it's not really a problem. I can see the pixels, and it would be nice if it were higher, but it's far from *unusable*.

(The Nexus 7 on the other hand has a dpi in the low 200s, which is enough of a difference to make it noticeably less pleasant to use. I would like to have text at around the same size as a compact paperback without pixelisation having a visible effect on the letterforms, and the Nexus 7 can't achieve that.)

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 23, 2013 14:19 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (guest, #49613) [Link] (1 responses)

> Eyes have a finite resolution of course, but they are constantly making micro-movements which you are largely unaware of on a conscious level, and which serve to increase the effective resolution beyond what you could expect from a purely static imaging device with the same number of sensors.

Yes, but even considering that stuff, a person with normal 20/20 vision can still only distinguish pixels larger than 1 arc minute (as per the definition of 20/20 vision).

Of course, a person with an above-average 20/10 vision can distinguish details down to 0.5 arc minutes, and a person with perfect 20/5 vision can distinguish anything down to 0.25 arc minutes, but for over half the population, the Apple Retina® displays are good enough when used at the specified distance or more.

Of course, everyone holds the phone closer than 12" from the eye occasionally, and half the population has (more or less) better than normal vision after all, so higher resolutions would not be totally useless, and I agree that eventually up to about 600dpi does make sense for phones...

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 24, 2013 12:51 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>Yes, but even considering that stuff, a person with normal 20/20 vision can still only distinguish pixels larger than 1 arc minute (as per the definition of 20/20 vision).

Fair enough - I was too lazy to look up any references to values for human visual acuity according to methodology, and unfairly assumed that sdalley was referencing the argument based solely upon counting the number of receptors in a given area of the retina.

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 23, 2013 16:31 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (2 responses)

> Now bear in mind that, when using a phone, you commonly hold it a lot less than a foot from your eyes,

This is just not true. I made an informal test around the office with ten people in the 25-45 age range. The average distance they held their phones (I just told them "call Joe" or "look this up in google with your phone") is 50cm (20in), the range being between 35cm and 65cm (13-27in).

If you hold your phone less than a foot away from your eyes, you are certainly severely nearsighted.

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 24, 2013 12:26 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>This is just not true. I made an informal test around the office with ten people in the 25-45 age range. The average distance they held their phones (I just told them "call Joe" or "look this up in google with your phone") is 50cm (20in), the range being between 35cm and 65cm (13-27in).

That's interesting, and perhaps it's less common than I was thinking, but perhaps our idea of 'commonly' just isn't the same.

Specifically, I pulled my phone out while I'm sitting at my desk, and browsed the web for a bit. In this case because I'm sitting down, my elbow is resting on the desk and I end up with the phone around 6-9 inches from my face. I look at my phone while sitting at a desk often enough that I definitely consider it a common use case, though perhaps others will differ.

If I'm just wandering around holding it freely with my arms, then I will indeed hold it further away.

>If you hold your phone less than a foot away from your eyes, you are certainly severely nearsighted.

Very definitely not.

Screen resolution

Posted Jul 24, 2013 12:48 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Even with my elbow propped on the desk, 12-15 feels a lot comfier than 6-9; at 6-9, I find the eye movements involved in "seeing the whole screen" become a noticeable distraction. (I'm 36 and have no material visual impairment.)

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 11:52 UTC (Tue) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] (3 responses)

Has there been any information whether the drivers will be free software?

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 12:54 UTC (Tue) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (2 responses)

I doubt. AIUI, they will using an existing SoC (system on chip = CPU + GPU [+ modem]) and its companion kernel/3D libs. That's why they copied code from libhybris, so that Mir/Wayland can use Android's graphics buffers.

I wish I would be wrong though.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 24, 2013 12:18 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a problem with that approach of having no inhouse driver developers. If there is any stability or other problems with the binary-only android drivers there is nothing Canonical do to help customers. Canonical can try to convince the SoC vendor to fix the bug, but chances are they just respond "we support our drivers on android, and we don't see the bug here".

Re-using Android and its user-space 3D libs/drivers

Posted Jul 24, 2013 12:56 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link]

Well, assuming the driver works fine in Android, the problem would then be elsewhere ;-)

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 23, 2013 19:16 UTC (Tue) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (4 responses)

I lost interest in this indiegogo campaign after I couldn't find any mention of Free or Open Source on the campaign page. I don't trust Canonical to make such a system sufficiently Free and Open for my tastes, unless they've specifically guaranteed to do so as part of the deal. In this case, they haven't.

I'm looking forward to the Firefox phone from Mozilla. I trust Mozilla to make everything they do Free and Open.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 24, 2013 4:19 UTC (Wed) by jbicha (subscriber, #75043) [Link]

Except for backend services (the servers powering Ubuntu One, Landscape, the online "Amazon" search providers, etc.), everything Canonical creates and releases to run on your computer, tablet, or phone is open source. And since Unity, GPLv3 has been their preferred license.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 26, 2013 7:20 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

FirefoxOS is in the same situation of needing proprietary drivers and firmware (usually from Android). They even wrote that into their design documents.

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 29, 2013 14:34 UTC (Mon) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link] (1 responses)

Sadly, yes - AFAIK no one (not even Google, who had a go with various Nexus devices) has yet managed to ship a completely free software phone in commercial quantities. We want to do it, but we aren't there yet.

Gerv

Bacon: Announcing the Ubuntu Edge

Posted Jul 31, 2013 10:45 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I doubt there is even a completely free software laptop available these days. There is just too much non-free software embedded in hardware these days; microSD cards, SSDs, hard drives, ethernet controllers, WiFi cards, 3G dongles, cameras, displays, touchpads, touchscreens, GPUs, ECs, BIOS, UEFI, even CPU microcode and CPU boot ROMs. With the current hardware industry this appears to be impossible to change. All the issues we are having with non-free low-level software (firmware, bootloaders, drivers etc) are just a symptom of the larger problem of the practices of the hardware industry; we need the equivalent of FSF/GNU/Debian for open, verifiable, trustable hardware.