Canonical says it asked its community for five people to work on the app and 100 people volunteered to answer the call.Ĭanonical’s technical architect Ondrej Kubik says it’s hoping to repeat this trick with Dropbox. Essentially developers gave up their time for free to build the app on Evernote’s behalf. For instance Evernote is on board, thanks to a community effort. So there are also music and news focused Scopes, to dice up and serve related tidbits of digital content.Ĭanonical says its own developer community is also getting involved with porting apps over. Rather the platform works to repurpose and stitch together the content the platform does have and can scrape in order to create the perception of a more fully featured offering. The key point here is the nascent Ubuntu mobile platform doesn’t have that many apps – the company tells TechCrunch there’s about 1,000 so far - so it makes sense to build a UI that doesn’t flag up that lack. It’s a bit trite but you can see what Canonical is trying to do - i.e. generate utility with limited source material at its disposal. ‘I’m bored’, or ‘I’m stressed’. Select ‘I’m stressed’ and the phone serves up nearby shopping locations, spas, and games and music that might help relax you. Here users can also specify the sort of content they are in the mood for by selecting from a list of potted descriptions – e.g. The first view you see after you unlock the phone (with a side swipe) is a Scope card showing the date, today’s weather and any upcoming events in your calendar. Swiping across brings in additional themed Scopes, such as one called Nearby which serves up location specific content such as nearby restaurants, pulled from Time Out (one of the handful of third party app makers supporting the platform at launch). And, further down the post, for photos of the higher end Meizu handset.Ĭanonical’s gesture-based UI is built around shuffling a series of content slices built atop HTML5, called Scopes, which foreground customizable cross-sections of data – saving users from having to dive into different apps to get certain types of info themselves. It’s been showing off that mid-tier device, made by BQ, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, along with a more premium smartphone made by Meizu, which will be released later this year - targeting the Chinese market.Ĭheck out the photo gallery below for close ups of the Ubuntu mobile OS interface, as seen on the mid-tier BQ. Canonical has finally got skin in the mobile game, putting its first Ubuntu phone on sale in Europe last month.

Ubuntu for android phones