Ubuntu On Mobile: A Mirror Image

CES Will Be Huge!

CES 2012 is just 4 days away.  Like any other year, there will be plenty of fluff, but a couple of awesome keynotes will also be thrown in the mix.  One of those keynotes will be from Canonical, parent company to the Ubuntu operating system (and ecosystem).

We’ve all read the news that Mark Shuttleworth will be making a big announcement involving a ‘concept design’ of some sort.  Is it a tablet?  A phone?  Most likely, it will be a glimpse at a future where Ubuntu 12.10 (or 13.04) will be running on a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop.  This is highly speculative, but seems to make sense to me based on the many hints we’ve been getting from Shuttleworth since he unleashed Unity onto the Linux mainstream.  What better name for a desktop that runs on any form factor than Unity?

One thing is for certain.  Soon, you will be able to run Ubuntu on a phone.  I know, I know, you already can…  but this time it will be use-able.  I want to try and detract from speculating what I think we will see from Canonical at CES and get straight to the point here.  In the desktop user-land, we have an immediate consumer choice- Mac or Windows.  Yes, hardware for Linux without a Windows license is out there too, but this is the presenting consumer choice.  Once we take the mainstream hardware home, we have another choice- alternative operating systems.

Whether you use BSD or Linux, your options are still open.  Though Microsoft or Apple may have ripped your ticket, you’ve paid the price of admission and you can do as you wish from here on out (for now).  Your options don’t end there!  You can boot into multiple operating systems off of one hard disk, and you can even virtualize.

2 years ago, the idea of having this kind of choice on your mobile was hardly being discussed, and it’s doubtful that the prospect was on most of your radars, aside from wreckless speculation.  You may not care for Ubuntu, and that’s fine.  You have made a choice and that’s good enough for me.  Ubuntu, however, will be the operating system to open the doors of choice to users of mainstream mobile hardware.  This does not exclude tablets either.  It’s obvious that Unity was designed to be touched, though none of us are really touching it right now…  Canonical is smart and has laid the foundation for an entire ecosystem that will work on any device.  The Ubuntu Software Center (centre) was the first step.  Unity was the next.  CES will be the third.

Soon, mobile phone users will have a choice that will be a mirror image of the choice we have with traditional laptop and desktop hardware.  In this brave new world, Android phones are like Windows devices.  They’re cheap, and you can do what you wish with them.  On a standard PC, you can run a myriad of different applications.  On your Android phone you will soon be able to run MeeGo (Tizen), Android, WebOS and Ubuntu- in no particular order of importance.  Choice is good and soon you will have it.

It also seems clear that Ubuntu is going to really sell their ecosystem at CES.  There is going to be hardware, and they will want you to buy it.  Is Canonical really going to open the mobile world up to more choice or will they try to sell devices that are exclusive to their operating system?  I should hope that they continue with their current model.  I imagine a post-CES future with the promise to allow users to download the forthcoming Ubuntu releases as freely as ever so that they can be installed on any device.  Call me crazy, but that’s kind of what they do now.

Will success change that?  Ubuntu was an instant success with the Linux crowd in 2004 and has been able to differentiate itself against the crowd of competing Linux distributions quite amicably.  Will that dominating marketshare translate into a new and stingy business model?

Only time will tell, but the kinds of things we are all imagining for CES this year takes more than just gusto on the behave of Shuttleworth and party.  It takes business partners.

Will they infect the water supply?