No Ubuntu Smartphone Released This Year

For a while we have been hopeful that the Ubuntu smartphone will arrive to the market shortly. It turns out this could just another pipe dream for Ubuntu fans. It has been reported recently that Canonical won’t be releasing the Ubuntu phone until next year. Worse, there’s a possibility that carrier-subsidized units will be locked down, negating the open source advantage of Ubuntu.

Canonical has clarified that the Ubuntu phone will be based on the Ubuntu 13.10, which will be released on October this year. But, it is quite unlikely that any smartphone model will be released officially before 2014.

Canonical will try to make the software platform an open source environment. However, carriers and manufacturers have learned that an open source system can cause significant harm on the hands of wrong people. They have discovered the same issue with Android and are looking to prevent that from happening again. There is also concern that Ubuntu will recreate the fragmentation issue that plagues the Android ecosystem. It will be interesting how Canonical, carriers and phone makers can come up with compromises and how the end result will be like.