What is the Ubuntu Phone OS actually like? Chris Salter gives it a test
There are currently three big phone operating systems: Android, iOS and Windows. Combined, the three have a huge share of the smartphone market, certainly in the Western world. However, they aren’t the only phone operating systems about, and the likes of Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch have been looking at changing that, if not in the West, then in the emerging markets, where high-end smartphones along the lines of Apple and Android are being challenged by locally produced and cheaper alternatives.
Mozilla has recently pulled the plug on Firefox OS, however, so that just leaves Ubuntu to fight against the big boys.
Canonical, the software firm behind Ubuntu, decided to enter the smartphone market, the aim being to converge its Linux desktop offering with a mobile operating system. An ambitious plan, seeing as Microsoft had tried it with Windows 8, and Apple was adding more features to iOS to bring it in line with OS X.
Ubuntu Touch took some time to get going, though. It was announced in October 2011 that Ubuntu would support smartphones in the future, but it wasn’t until January 2013 that we got a glimpse of the first Ubuntu Touch release, and it wasn’t until later in that year that version 1.0 was released. This initial release would work on the Google Nexus devices and required the user to flash the device with the Ubuntu Touch image.
In the meantime, Ubuntu had created the software store within the desktop, hoping to move that across to the phones as and when the operating system took off.
In February of this year, Ubuntu Touch had its first smartphone released: the BQ Aquaris E4.5. If you’ve never heard of BQ, it’s a small Spanish smartphone manufacturer that happens to make Android smartphones, as well as Ubuntu smartphones. While the initial release consisted of just a single phone, BQ has since added a 5” version of the phone with some updated specifications. In addition, another Ubuntu Touch phone has been released by Meizu (the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition). Both these manufacturers are fairly small, but they also offer the same phone with Android on. Perhaps until one of the large manufacturers takes up the OS, it’s unlikely to become a mainstream phone OS, although as a chicken and egg problem, one of the large manufacturers such as HTC is unlikely to pick it up until there’s sufficient demand.
However, how does it compare to Android and other systems? Is it any good? I purchased a BQ to give Ubuntu Touch a test.
Ubuntu Touch
The BQ Aquaris is a fairly unassuming phone. Specificationwise, it’s not a high-end phone by any stretch. I’m not a huge follower of phone specifications, but the phone is towards the lower end of the market (see the specification boxout). The phone cost €170 (approximately £125) when I bought it, putting it towards a mid-range market price. For comparison, you could purchase a Moto E, which had a similar specification (1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon, 1GB RAM and 8GB internal space with a 5MP rear camera but with support for 4G) for about £100.
The phone is sold SIM free and takes a micro SIM, so I was able to use the same SIM I’d been using in my Samsung S5. The Ubuntu phone doesn’t support 4G, so I was limited to 3G, but this was a factor of the phone, rather than the operating system. The phone is fairly unassuming and lacks buttons. In fact, that’s one thing that took some getting used to: the phone has no buttons, other than the power and volume buttons. No home button here like the iPhone. It’s also a dual SIM phone, so you’ll be able to use two different SIM cards at once. I hear this is more common in foreign countries, where users often have two SIM cards: one for the expensive data plan and one for the talk and text package. However, it might benefit someone looking to cut down from having a work phone and personal phone to a single phone.
The phone also takes micro-SD cards up to 64GB. While some Android phones are slowly dropping external storage support, the Aquaris still has the slot, and Ubuntu Touch lets you use it for images (from the camera) and for music storage. There appears to be no default method of checking how much space is free on the device. Even though the phone has an app for managing the micro-SD card (in terms of formatting it; there doesn’t seem to be a file browser), the method for checking storage on the phone doesn’t also check the microSD card. It also doesn’t appear that you can offload apps to the micro-SD card. Yet you can download a Terminal app (that then asks for your password; it’s your phone lock code if you have one), and you can browse the file-system of the phone and micro-SD card just like you could a Linux device (it is running Linux, after all). This lets you list files and check used space from the command line. It also allows you to access and move files using the default Linux commands (mv, cp etc.).
The setup of the phone was fairly easy. Like any other smartphone, upon switching on, I was asked to choose my language and then proceed with the setup. The initial steps were straightforward, connecting to my wi-fi. And that’s it! It does ask if you want to connect any online accounts, but unlike Apple and Android, you aren’t required to create an online account to set up the phone. Mind, like Apple, Google and Microsoft, if you want to download apps from the Ubuntu Store, you’ll need to create an account. This is an Ubuntu One account, which is a single sign on, so you can use it on Launchpad and other Ubuntu services (you might not, therefore, have to create an account if you already have one).
The Ubuntu system, like the desktop, allows you to connect to various other different online services. I was able to connect my phone to my Google account, allowing me to sync all my contacts between my iPhone and Android devices. There are a list of services that can be linked. These include Google, Evernote, Twitter and Flickr. These let you interact with the services via apps and scopes (see boxout for what a scope is).
Using the phone is perhaps different to all of the major brands. There are no back buttons, home buttons or any such navigation controls on the home screen or in general. Anywhere else, though, certain apps do have navigation buttons. Navigating the phone is all done with gestures and swiping from the sides of the phone. This certainly takes some getting used to, as it goes against everything that’s been done to date in the phone market. On the iPhone, you use the home button to return to the main menu and use the buttons in app. Android depends on the hardware but usually has a back button (even a software one). Ubuntu does away with all of that and everything is done by swiping in from the sides of the phone.
Swiping right to left brings up the app menu; users of the desktop version of Ubuntu would be at home with this, because it’s the same as the launch bar on the desktop (Ubuntu is keen to bring the desktop and phone experience closer together). Swiping right to left from the edge of the phone brings up the quick application changer. However, this can be annoying when browsing the scopes on the main page, as I found that I would often pull up the application changer, rather than change the scope I was looking at. I’m sure with more practise, this wouldn’t happen, but it made navigating feel a bit clunky, as I was often having to go back to the beginning of what I was doing.
Swiping down from the top brings up the notification centre. This puts most Android ROMs to shame in how much detail you can access from here. There are a lot of changes that you can make from the notification centre in terms of power settings, notifications, Bluetooth and other settings. However, these are all on different pages of the notification centre, so you can find yourself swiping across on the different pages to find what you’re actually after. Swiping up from the bottom (while in the scopes) brings up the scope chooser. From here you can rearrange or change the scopes that are in the main screen. A large range of scopes are included, and you can download more from the app store. Most of these are similar to Metro apps on Windows: news articles and web services you might use often. However, you can have messages, call logs, pictures and music scopes here so you can have quick access to files when you need to.
Accessing files on the phone can be done by plugging into the computer. Plugging into a Windows machine makes the phone appear as a device (rather than a removable drive). This is actually a good thing, as you don’t have to browse the entire phone file system to access photos or videos if you need to. However, if you use a Linux box, you can hook into the file system directly by downloading the phablettools package in Ubuntu (these are in the Ubuntu universe repository). With these installed, you can hook directly into the phone file system and core functions itself. You can also access the phone via command line and perform tasks (for example, you can take screenshots of the phone by issuing a command from the terminal).
The core functions of the phone, calling and messaging, were fine. I didn’t have any problems there. Yet, as a smartphone, it was interesting to see no email app installed, whereas Android, Windows and iOS all include a raft of default applications, email being one of them. Perhaps because Ubuntu doesn’t offer its own email, it doesn’t feel the need to include one; only a Gmail app is installed by default.
Conclusions
I’ve tried here to consider the operating system rather than the specifications of the phone (though they needed mentioning). The phone performs reasonably well, but it might be good to see the performance on a faster handset. This isn’t to say that the operating system doesn’t work, because it does, but running on a high-end device would be a good test to demonstrate what the operating system is like running on top-end hardware and therefore showing the limitations of the software, rather than any limitations that might be caused by the phone itself.
Like Windows Phone, Ubuntu Touch suffers from a lack of apps. It’s a bit of a catch-22, as Microsoft has found: people don’t want to move to the phone until it has applications, and developers don’t want to develop until people are using the platform. However, Ubuntu has the perk of being open source, so others can edit and make changes if they want to. Even though the operating system should be open source, not all the apps are, and there are paid-for apps within the app store already. I’ve nothing against this myself, as developers have put time and effort into the design and programming of the work, but it could put off some hard-core free and open-source software fans, who might have been attracted to the Linux roots of the phone.
The current market for the phone is hard to figure out. This could be reasonable for someone as a first phone: if you haven’t used another smartphone, the difference in navigating wouldn’t be so different, though this is easily picked up. The scopes are an interesting feature, akin to widgets, but perhaps more focus should be on native apps, rather than web apps. Saying that, research shows that the developing market, such as in Asia, uses websites and web apps far more than apps, so perhaps this isn’t a problem for users not used to apps.
Overall, Ubuntu wants to bring together the experience of using a desktop and phone. I think that this experience is wide of the mark. I’m not even sure that people want their phones and computers to be the same; after all, smartphone usage is on the rise, but computer use is falling. People would therefore want the phone to be able to do what they want it do, and I think Ubuntu misses the mark slightly in this regard. Without an easy way to share photos to online services or other files, it makes it a bit difficult. With the underlying Linux roots, however, it could make an ideal phone for a Linux geek who loves the command line; they should be able to make the phone their own. As a basic smartphone OS, it works sufficiently well. It could prove interesting to see where it develops, but at the minute, it’s a bit rough around the edges.