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The Ubuntu phone is real and going on sale next week

2/7/2015

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It's been a long road, spanning more than two years of adversity, but Ubuntu finally has a smartphone to call home. It's called the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and is built by Spanish company BQ. This little-known manufacturer of tablets and e-readers is adapting one of its Android handsets to run Ubuntu and selling it for €169.90 (just over $190) in a series of flash sales across Europe. It's an unusual way to release a phone: followers of the @ubuntu and @bqreaders Twitter accounts will be the first to be alerted any time the Aquaris E4.5 UE becomes available to buy.



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The modest price is matched by this first Ubuntu phone's barebone spec sheet. The 4.5-inch display has only qHD resolution (540 x 960), the processor is a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek chip, there's no LTE option, and the onboard storage is limited to 8GB. To offset these restrictions, the Aquaris allows memory expansion via a microSD card and also has two micro-SIM slots for added flexibility. If there's one spec indulgence here, it's the 5-megapixel front-facing camera, which BQ highlights as a major feature on the Android variant of this phone.

Though obviously aimed at the budget-conscious phone buyer, the Ubuntu phone faces tough competition from cheaper alternatives like the excellent Moto E on Android and Microsoft's latest Lumia devices running Windows Phone. Canonical, the company in charge of Ubuntu, believes it has a unique proposition to offer with its concept of Scopes. It eschews the traditional app-based interaction model in favor of "a new UI paradigm, designed to deliver content and services directly to categorised home screens, giving users a rich, unfragmented experience." This sort of content aggregation — serving web videos from YouTube and Vimeo as well as your own recorded media on the same screen — has been tried previously and never really succeeded. Canonical is therefore embarking on a highly ambitious project, but that's to be expected from the company that once sought $32 million to build the Ubuntu Edge smartphone that never materialized.
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    Nathan Scheuerlein
    Smart Phone Technician

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