 Hey guys this is Tom with The Verge and we're looking at Ubuntu running on a Nexus 10 tablet. Now you'll see we're on the lock screen here and you can flick through all the available users and the notifications on the right hand side will change depending on that. The backgrounds also change and everything is password protected but there is actually a guest mode that you can enable for friends to get in. A quick swipe to the left will bring you to the actual home screen for Ubuntu here. You'll see apps listed at the top and you can swipe to the right to get more. There's a video section and there's also sections for people and for music as well. Most of the navigation on the OS is horizontal but there's also some scrolling required too. As you'd expect Ubuntu is bundled in apps. There's a people app that provides all your contacts. There's a video app where you can get access to TV and movies and there's other apps that make this really a consumption device that's almost similar to Amazon's Kindle. The gallery app provides access to pictures and photos but it breaks from the norm by displaying them in a range of sizes as the default view. It has all the navigation features you'd expect but there's also an album option complete with fake binders so it's clear that the makers of Ubuntu are fans of skeuomorphism. The album section will also generate a flipboard style view of your photos. It's not as smooth as it could be but it's still early days. This Ubuntu operating system really comes to life when you start to look at the gestures available. So a quick swipe down from the top of the screen will reveal a quick settings menu that provides access to the date and time, network status, battery levels and even the ability to change the screen brightness. It also acts as a hub for your notifications allowing you to reply in line to Facebook messages or simply to swipe and dismiss them. Ubuntu's implementation feels very similar to Android but it does it in its own style that allows you to touch and hold to navigate through the various sections. Some of the gestures are also available to swipe back to the home screen. The star of the show here is really Ubuntu's side view. Visually it's almost identical to Windows 8's snap view and it allows you to run apps side by side. The aim is to have phone apps running in the side view but Ubuntu also plans to allow developers to create apps that will switch between full and side view in future to take advantage of the different screen sizes available. It's a helpful feature and you can imagine scenarios where you're in a web page and you want to copy a chunk of text and perhaps paste it into a note. Side view allows you to do this and a lot more. You can also obviously launch other applications such as a Twitter app. You could be in your photos app or even the browser and you'd be able to monitor your tweets on the right hand side. Speaking of browsers, Ubuntu includes a WebKit one that acts as you'd expect. I got to test it alongside an on screen keyboard which is a fairly standard affair for a tablet operating system. I got to test it with the Verge homepage and it was the first time that I noticed the operating system experience any lag. Text and images seemed to render well but navigation, particularly zooming, wasn't that great. On the flip side I got to check out another gesture that lets you swipe up from the bottom to access a task manager to switch between apps or close them. The widget also provides access to the application settings, in this case letting you bookmark pages etc. It also provides access to search options and the ability to use speech to find launchable commands. In the photos app you could search for colour balance and it would display the relevant commands in the sidebar instead of app settings. You can then edit an image quickly changing the various options available. Once its feature is activated it also picks up other commands like crop so you can activate that particular mode too. This is all contextual so you'll get different options in various apps. Overall Ubuntu for tablets feels like a mix of Android, Windows 8 and Kindle as it's using similar features from all three. A developer build will be released this week but the final OS and hardware won't be available until Q1 2014.