By now I'm sure you've heard of the great news. Ubuntu is coming for mobile platforms, including a combination of Android+Ubuntu. While this is rather small news when you think of the (rather limited) phone experience, it does have a point. A very important point as well if you ask me.
For about a year now many people, including me, have been wondering about the staggering amount of power mobile phones have. Over 1GHz processors, dual-core processors, dedicated GPUs, now even quad-core processors with each processor overpowering many desktops from this century. The sheer amount of computing capability just sitting in our pockets is astounding, and until Ubuntu, there has been pretty much nothing that would use all of that juice.
What Canonical, the company financing the development of Ubuntu, a distribution of Linux, an architecture on which Android is built as well, has been trying to do for the past 4 years is bring the power of your pocket-pc (that's what smartphones really were until they were called smartphones, just simple PDAs) to the desktop level. Plug your phone in to a screen and a keyboard (and a mouse if you like) and you get the typical Ubuntu experience that you get right now on a desktop or a laptop. It is exactly the same thing DELL tried to do with laptops and docks - keep the laptop dock connected to a large screen (or screens), a mouse, an optional external keyboard, external drives, anything. And when you come home, simply put your laptop in the dock and use it as a real workstation. It was quite impressive. And if you can carry your phone around, and just plug it in to do anything you would on a laptop or a desktop, I am all for that. It is a concept Canonical demoed last February as well, though it got very little attention. Now, it appears that they are much closer to a final product.
But most people already have a desktop or a laptop, or both. And they are accustomed to the idea that when their computer becomes too slow (or they break it with bad care), they buy a new computer, not a new phone. So the market is not really ready for these all-in-one devices, even though this would probably decrease the problem of low battery. After all, if you plug it in to use it as a computer, it charges while you do that.
While the phone-PC combo is extremely cool and futuristic, it is not the only thing that Canonical wishes to roll out. The phone-PC was originally meant to use Android as a base - when you use your phone as a phone, it's Android that you use, when you dock it, you get Ubuntu. Pretty much what the ASUS PadFones were about, except that with the larger screen you also get more options. And this is where it really gets good.
The tablet has been more or less a fashion product, something to entertain the elderly, the kids, cats, iguanas, frogs, or really anything else with. A toy, because it has been forced to run an operating system meant for tiny devices. Devices that were so limited that the operating systems don't even know the meaning of multitasking, let alone keeping a video playing in a browser tab which is not currently selected. With the Tegra 4 coming, tablets have the screen estate and the wherewithal to compete with modern netbooks when it comes to power. Netbooks that already have a normal operating system like Ubuntu. And many tablets even come with a slide-out keyboard or a keyboard dock so that makes them even more like netbooks. What they do better than netbooks is the creative part. Handwriting, drawing, interactive demos, anything to do with a touchscreen. The old Wacom tabs were a hit among cartoonists and designers who wanted their computer to understand their pencil movements, who wanted to draw directly to their computer. Getting Ubuntu on tablets would enable tablets to become the netbooks of the modern age. Devices as small as netbooks, but with a lot more possibilities.
Sure, there have been unofficial ports of Ubuntu to tablets (because Ubuntu is an open source platform, it is rather flexible and does not depend on a single type of processor architecture, such as Intel, but instead supports other hardware as well, such as the ARM processors), but they tend to have the same shortcomings. The chipsets are not fully supported, which means that perhaps the HDMI port does not work out of the box and requires tinkering or WiFi is spotty, or the tablet keyboard lacks the F1-F12 keys which one would use in Linux if they for some reason did not want to use a graphical user interface (fat chance for that though). And as with all unofficial ports, you lose the warranty (as you need to break or 'root' your laptop to make it work better) and, at the same time, risk bricking it (which is uncommon, but very easy to do for a beginner) and lose the option or over-the-air updates if you were to revert to Android (because the bootloader has signing problems).
However, since Android was built for phones, and tablets follow the structure of phone more or less, once Ubuntu is made fully compatible with Android devices (should not take long since they are both based on Linux so the underlying stuff is already there), Ubuntu will natively be compatible with tablets. And that, my friends, is the point when tablets gain use for an average person. Because let's face it, Android apps are very limited, even when it comes to simple .docx editing or watching movies with DTS sound. Ubuntu on the other hand is smooth, and with the new and reduced Unity, very easily usable. Even for those who have never touched a Linux distribution before, as odd as it may be, I would actually recommend it.
Canonical is proving that geeks are now the cool kids in town, the people with power and the knowledge to use it. They are the people who get paid the big bucks now, and they are the people whose work we can all benefit from more and more in our daily lives. The hardware was there a long time ago, now they are bringing in the software that will change how we think of mobile computing.
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