Just when you thought there isn’t any space left for yet another smartphone OS to land on the already overcrowded space, here comes yet another one!
Today it’s the turn of Canonical Limited, the people behind the development of Ubuntu – the open source desktop Operating System to announce their intention to come up with a new smartphone OS in the next few months. Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth has also posted a video detailing the proposed User Interface of the OS. As of now, there is no hardware that runs this OS (apart from internal prototypes developed by Canonical themselves) and if we are to believe Mark, most Android toting phones of today would be capable of running Ubuntu for smartphones as well.
One major difference with Ubuntu for smartphones if you compare it with Android is the fact that unlike Android which relies on Java Virtual Machine in order to execute a lot of apps, this new platform would be able to run natively on any ARM architecture – thereby increasing the performance. With support for HTML5 apps as well, developers can create non-native applications for the new platform.
Another advantage with Ubuntu for smartphones is that it existing applications designed to run on the desktop version of Ubuntu would seamlessly work on the phone version of the OS as well.
In a video released by Canonical yesterday, they have detailed a very slick looking UI that matches any current mainstream smartphone OS UI out there.
Mark Shuttleworth has also featured in another video that appeals to developers, manufacturers and carriers for their support in developing this new platform.
How successful Canonical eventually manages to be in this endeavour is something we would be watching with keen interest. What do you think?
