Hello Linux Geeksters. According to insights.ubuntu.com, Vodafone has decided to join the Canonical Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), in order to support Ubuntu Touch, the mobile version and Ubuntu, and sell phones with Ubuntu for phones pre-installed.
Vodafone Group is part of the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG). As a member of the CAG, Vodafone Group will join national and multi-national carriers in discussions that influence the development of Ubuntu for smartphones.
There are many other important telecom operators in the CAG group, worth mentioning being: Verizon, Smartfen, MTN Group, Deutsche Telekom, LG Uplus, Korea Telecom, Italian Telecom, China Unicom, Portugal Telecom, SK Telecom, Everything Everywhere.
This is actually good news, since Vodafone has over 411 million customers in over 30 countries.
For those who don’t know, Canonical has been working a lot at Ubuntu Touch, the mobile version of Ubuntu. While the initial plan was to make it available for all the Google Nexus smartphones and tablets, the developers have dropped the support for Galaxy Nexus, Google Nexus 7 2012 and Google Nexus 10, Ubuntu Touch being officially available only for the Google Nexus 4 smartphone and the Google Nexus 7 2013 tablet.
Despite the fact that the first stable version of Ubuntu Touch was based on Ubuntu 13.10, the development has switched to Ubuntu 14.04 and the latest Ubuntu Touch images are quite stable.
Also worth mentioning, Mark’s Shuttleworth big dream is to reach full desktop-mobile convergence somewhere between the releases of Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04 (between October 2014 and April 2015). Also worth mentioning: most likely the first smartphone with Ubuntu Touch pre-installed will be released in 2015 and will not be manufactured by Meizu, despite what was rumored.