T-Mobile joins effort to bring Ubuntu phones to US mobile market Fourth-ranked US wireless operator T-Mobile has become the latest mobile carrier to join Canonical's Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), bringing the group's total membership to 13. "T-Mobile USA reaches almost 300 million American consumers and business people today," Canonical said in a statement on Thursday. "As a member …
I don't own a smartphone for a couple of reasons.
Firstly I prefer a phone that only needs charging once a week.
Secondly I'm not keen to have a lot of personal data in a mobile device which the NSA can trawl through or get stolen.
However if I were to buy one it would be an Ubuntu Edge. I feel that at least I would have the ability to configure it as I wished and not have a Google/Apple/Windows backdoor.
I hope that Canonical succeed.
"I feel that at least I would have the ability to configure it as I wished and not have a Google/Apple/Windows backdoor."
If the mobile operators are pushing for it you can expect it's because they want to own the backdoor. And to lock you into their content source.
Don't expect anything better then Android, and quite possibly worse. If the operators put in enough money to get a say expect a T-Mobile app store, and an AT&T app store, and ... Forget updates it's time for a new phone and a new contract.
You will end up having to do that same thing you can already do with Android, root the phone and install a non-official ROM.
I bought my first "smart" phone this year, mostly because I needed to have mobile email for work. I had a Motorola Razor flip phone before that. I went for a Nexus 4 as the least crapped up phone available.
..........Google/Samsung's baby and they don't want Win Phone because its Microsoft's baby. Or rather they want something that will compete will all of the above without them having to do fuck all to achieve this. Furthermore it would be a lot more convincing if the US telecoms were not amongst the keenest on earth to control the market according to their own interests and amongst the most unscrupulous when it comes to how they go about achieving such goals.
*Let me make quite clear that I am in no way hostile to Ubuntu phones (or mobs based on any other variant of Linux), indeed I wish them (wholly sincerely) the very best of luck. It is the attitude of the "service providers" I am referring to.
I should also mention the following:
"unique, hybrid computing model, in which an Ubuntu phone will function as a full-fledged Linux PC when it's plugged into a keyboard and monitor."
Now that would make such a device very interesting from a personal user case point of view as far as I am concerned, very interesting indeed.
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