What’s new:
As a reminder, Canonical been invited at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014, where they have presented Ubuntu Touch running on the new Meizu and BQ smartphones and on some Google Nexus smartphones and tablets.
The geeks from the mobilelinuxnews.com have posted a video of Ubuntu Touch, presented at MWC 2014, running on the Nexus 4 phone and the Nexus 7 tablet. You can see for yourself that the user interface of the Ubuntu Touch is quite intuitive, the Unity 8 usage being the main target of the video:
The story so far:
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. Also, Canonical has recently announced that Meizu and BQ will be the first two Ubuntu Touch phone manufacturers.
While there aren’t a lot of applications for Ubuntu Touch yet available, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth hopes that by the time the first Ubuntu Touch powered phones hit the market, the top 50 Android/iOS apps will be available for Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu Touch uses Unity 8 as the default desktop environment, which recently got new Unity Scopes and a Scopes Store, a feature that is not yet available on Ubuntu 14.04 for desktop.
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).