What’s new:
Canonical has stopped promoting Ubuntu Touch images for a while (except for the unstable channel), due to some chroot issues, that were causing the environment to be unstable.
The developers have adpted a TRAINCON-0 mode testing, which means that the QA people will double test the important updates, so that unusable images won’t be uploaded, but this will also slow down the image promotion process.
The promotion of new Ubuntu Touch images was stopped between image #150 until #157, image #157 being the first one ready to be promoted in the devel channel, and so, the TRAINCON-0 has stopped.
Among others, the latest Ubuntu Touch image #157 comes with HDR mode support added to the camera app, the dialer, messaging app and address-book app have received graphical improvements, Mir has been updated to version 0.5.0, geolocation support has been implemented, the Ubuntu keyboard has received enhancements, dual-SIM support has bee added to both the dialer and the messaging applications, a transfer indicator has been implemented, a new Ubuntu UI Toolkit has been made available, and some Unity 8 improvements have been added.
Canonical is performing both automated and manual tests for the Ubuntu Touch images and so, broken Ubuntu Touch images don’t get available for download.
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, now based on Ubuntu 14.10, being officially available only for the Google Nexus 4 smartphone and the Google Nexus 7 2013 tablet. (Nexus 5 is not yet support by Ubuntu Touch.) The first Ubuntu Touch powered phones are scheduled to be released this year, in Europe by BQ and on the Chinese market by Meizu, one Asia’s leading smartphone manufacturers.
Due to the fact that Ubuntu Touch is not yet stable enough to be used on mobile devices, the Canonical developers are planning to release a RTM (release-to-manufacturing) branch, where they will be focused on bug-fixes and stability improvements, and not the implementation of new features.
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).