Ubuntu reveals its first phone, will start selling in Europe first

Updated on 09-Feb-2015
HIGHLIGHTS

Canonical will be coming out with its first Ubuntu powered smartphone. For now it will be sold in Europe only.

Ubuntu for mobiles has been around for three years now and in all this time we haven’t seen any physical devices ship with the operating system but this is going to change soon. Canonical, the company, behind Ubuntu has partnered with Spanish mobile manufacturer BQ to come out with its first device.

The said device is based on the Aquaris E4.5 smartphone from BQ and is called Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition. The Aquaris E4.5 is powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek processor and a Mali-400 GPU. The phone will have 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage with support of upto 32GB via a microSD card. It has a 4.5-inch qHD 960 x 540p display with an IPS panel.

The phone has an 8MP rear and a 5MP front facing camera. It comes with dual-SIM capabilities but does support 4G LTE. The upcoming phone will be facing competition from the affordable Moto E. Canonical have further plans to take the Ubuntu powered smartphone to the US.

With this device Ubuntu will also be launching a new feature called scopes which wasn’t part of the developer previews. This feature will bring related content from various apps to one screen.

The OS is very late to the smartphone ecosystem but it is likely that it might have better chance at the market than Firefox OS.

Hardik Singh

Light at the top, this odd looking creature lives under the heavy medication of video games.

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