UPDATED 07:46 EDT / DECEMBER 11 2013

NEWS

High-end Ubuntu Touch OS phones set to ‘touchdown’ next year

The last 12 months have been a pretty wild ride for the Ubuntu Touch operating system for smartphones. Canonical first announced the OS back in January, and following the release of a developer preview back in February, the company embarked on an ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to get its high-end Ubuntu Edge smartphone ‘crowdfunded’ on IndieGoGo. The Ubuntu Edge will sadly never see the light of day, but Canonical pushed ahead with the first true release of its mobile OS in October, and now, with 2014 almost upon us, it’s getting ready to release its first smartphones that come pre-installed with the software.

That’s right, Ubuntu Touch is finally ready to make its mark, after Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth announced that the company has penned a deal with its first – yet so far unnamed – smartphone partner.

Shuttleworth made the announcement yesterday at the LeWeb Conference, revealing that Canonical’s agreed a deal that will see its new partner offer high-end smartphones running the Ubuntu Touch OS.

“We have concluded our first set of agreements to ship Ubuntu on mobile phones,” Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth told CNET.

“We’ve shifted gears from ‘making a concept’ to ‘it’s going to ship.’ That has a big impact on the team.”

As to what kind of specifications the phones will have, and how much they will cost, that wasn’t revealed. However, Shuttleworth did state that the company is “at the board level on four household brands. They sell a lot of phones all over the world, in emerging and fully emerged markets, to businesses and consumers.”

That sounds promising, but once again we’re going to have to wait to find out who those brands are, as Shuttleworth refused to say.

Nevertheless, today’s a big milestone for the Ubuntu Touch OS, after many months of development work behind the scenes. That’s not to say it’s going to be a walk in the park from here on in – Canonical’s likely to find the mobile marketplace a very tough nut to crack. Even so, Shuttleworth seems confident that Ubuntu Touch can hold its own, thanks to an immersive services-first interface on top and its flexible programming foundation beneath.

“Volume is important. We want to do stuff that people use every day,” he said.


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