Ubuntu smartphone offers alternative to apps
They lost the one factor that was truly differentiating. Arguably, it was the reason we got so excited the first time around.<p>I feel as though the entire market is screaming for something obvious to exist. It's so obvious, so compelling, so useful...<p>And so far away.<p>Why do we even have "desktops" and "laptops" and "phones" and "tablets" and "wearable watches" and so forth? Actually, the rise of the wearable watch gives us the biggest clue: it's because we care about form factors.<p>When I'm on the subway, I want something to hold in my hand. When I'm in a big hurry or on a jog, I want to glance at something on my wrist. When I'm in bed but don't want to disturb my partner, I want to interact with a larger yet personal tablet. When I want to type something (including code) or interact with content in more involved ways, I want something with a mouse and a keyboard. When I want to have  a state of the art immersion experience, I want something with a lot of horsepower (and preferably a head mounted display of some sort).<p>Why do I have to have different computers for all of this when all I want is different I/O modalities (and related computing expansion devices)? Why do we keep ignoring the fact that what we want is the ability to experience our virtual world in the input / output environment that suits us at this moment? Everything else is secondary.<p>I was so excited when the original Ubuntu Edge was announced, because I felt that FINALLY someone had figured out how to make the thing we've all been screaming for. But now I'm not so sure Canonical really "got it" after all. If they did, it would have been the first feature they kept, not the first one they cut. To even call it a "feature" is diminutive. It's a paradigm that wants to exist.<p>We've seen already with the Motorola Atrix that it's harder than it sounds to get this right. But why is it THIS hard? Why can't we start with a phone that can be the CPU for wearables and tablets, and that can dock into a higher horsepower "GPU station" with a mouse and a keyboard and a monitor when we need it? You don't have to nail the performance profile as much as you have to nail why the experience is obviously better. I argue that you don't need a supercomputer in your pocket to pull that off.<p>Is it just me on this, or what?