[Nexus 4 General] littlegreen:
Hey guys! I’m doing a personal review of Ubuntu Touch on the Nexus4 device, and I thought I could share it with you.

It’s kind of a “Pros and cons” thing, but since I tend to get off-topic easily and babble a lot I’ve divided things in sections,

so you don’t have to read everything should you not want to.

Here it goes - Ubuntu Touch on the Google Nexus 4 (mako).

Installing Ubuntu has always been a pleasant experience for me. It feels open. Feels different. Feels fresh. Feels UBUNTU.

Installing any linux distribution on any PC makes mu blood run like crazy and Ubuntu Touch makes no difference.

It’s exciting to see something new and beautiful done for phones. And it’s even more exciting when you see it’s done with taste.​

Now just to be clear – when it comes to Pros and Cons I guess the “Cons” section would be obviously much larger,

but hey: it’s a developers preview of what we should be expecting so I’m willing to suck some things up.

Pros:

1.	Design.

Ubuntu Touch feels like Ubuntu in your hand. I just have to say this. I’m not sure if it’s the fonts or the wallpapers or the

transitions or the launch pad on the left or something else that I couldn’t quite grasp and understand,

but the fact is UT feels right. Feels Ubuntu.

2.	Screen usage

Almost every other mobile OS has some buttons be it hardware or software (eg. Android’s software buttons on the screen + the 3-dot thingy).

Ubuntu gives you the whole screen to have for yourself and your app. It’s amazing how even the “Contacts” app feels bigger and more open.

3.	Docking

I haven’t had the chance to go through the UT docking experience yet. I don’t even know if it’s quite baked yet, but what

I’ve seen on videos and ads is pretty awesome. The very idea of it makes it way cool. Chuck Norris cool.

The vision that one can have his PC in his pocket at all times is nothing but genius.

4.	Compatibility

Ubuntu aims to be compatible with lots of devices. Which is good, I guess. I just hope compatibility doesn’t come

at the expense of stability or power management or something else that might come along and present itself as an issue.

5.	Stability

I am yet to witness an app to crash or force-close or just close or anything like that.

I do get some strange freezes for a few seconds every now and then though.

Cons:

1.	Installation

Installation can present itself to be harsh on someone who know nothing about using the terminal. There was a small step

missing in the installation tutorial which can cause some people to get confused. Mainly people with no

prior unlocking/rooting/flashing ROMs experience.

2.	Boot

No boot animation. First time the phone booted it needed quite some time and there wasn’t even a splash screen indicating

something was working. The screen had the backlight on and that was it. No shutdown animation as well. And while we’re

still on the subject: there is no shutdown menu, which was kind of strange – I mean when you hold the power button the

phone just shuts down – no questions asked. I guess that might be good in some situations, but I’d rather have the shutdown menu.

3.	Overall performance

Overall performance is laggy. The “use-of-edge” design is pretty neatly thought of, but in real life it need polishing. A LOT of polishing.

Swipes act strange, I move from app to app by accident.. My personal guess is that one can get used to it in a couple days

but the swipes should take a step towards being more intuitive as well.

I didn’t like the fact that the music page doesn’t stream anything, but takes you to the browser and when you hit play on some

hit you’re supposed to hear you get a message that flash is not supported or crashed or something like that. It’s kind of frustrating.

I think a native app should be replacing that page on the home screen real soon.

4.	Social media

Neither Facebook nor Twitter have native apps. All you get is a mobile version in the browser. I don’t think it needs further explanation.

I hope both Facebook and Twitter do something about this. I don’t think it’s up to Canonical to make apps for those… or up to the

community for that matter. Anyway. I didn’t see a LinkedIn, Pinterest or any other social platform on the suggested apps, so

I guess I’ll just stop here.

5.	Graphical glitches

Sometimes things will shift aside or up and down and text would overlap. It’s not something you can’t live with – a simple swipe one

way or another – fixes it, but I think all would agree it’s not an eye-candy feature. There are a few of these throughout the system.

It’s nothing serious in my opinion, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it in the “Pros” section.

The clock disappeared form everywhere except the clock app. I mean it – everywhere. It’s not on the homescreen,

it’s not in the “notification bar”, it’s nowhere. It happened after I rebooted the device for the first time. Also alarms don’t

seem to be working at all.

//* after a second reboot clock reappeared. Alarms still don’t work though.

Another thing is after picking up a call and finishing it – when you put the phone away from your ear the screen won’t turn on by itself.

That’s kind of odd if you ask me. It’s like it knows I’m saying “goodbye” and saves my battery or something. It’s a minor setback,

but still. I noticed that during the dialing process screen lights up if you take the phone away from your ear. I haven’t read a lot of

UT documentation, so it might be on purpose – I’m just stating what I’ve experienced.

6.	Navitagion

Navigation is bad right now, I think. It looks like the OS isn’t sure how to respond to your swipe. Transitions are slow in my opinion.

They should be a tad faster. A major setback is the back button. I mean seriously – how many times do you misclick on something

and want to go right back. Think about it. It’s at least a few times a day. I think the back button should be visible the first few seconds

along with the rest of the app menu – should there be one. Or maybe just put it in the top left corner next to the search. If you think there

is no space – the search can always morph into “just a button” ... Other than that I can’t complain about navigation – it’s pretty neat,

actually. Menus are simple and understandable.

7.	Hardware glitches

Everytime I wake my device up my Bluetooth is ON and I need to turn it off manually.

I can’t say I like that at all but considering that is all I have to say about hardware glitches I think it's not that bad.

8.	3G

3G is really important. AND it works! There’s just now way to shut it off.

I mean sure – you can turn off the mobile data, but when it comes to choosing whether to use 3G or 2G Networks Only – you don’t really have a choice.

You’re stuck with 3G and all the disadvantages that come with it as well as the advantages.

//* We all know what happens to your battery when using 3G and I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t like to turn his mobile data ON and OFF all the time – it just stays enabled all the time and saves me whole lotta thinking. Not having the choice of switching back to “2G networks only” sends you straight in hell in terms of battery life.

9.	Syncing

Since I’m obviously new to Ubuntu Touch I just recently started using Ubuntu One, but my gosh! Syncing contacts with Google is a

real pain in the ass. Since the Gmail app is not a native app, but a HTML5 client instead, syncing appears to be impossible at this point.

Users are forced to hook their devices up to a PC running Ubuntu and write a bunch of commands in the terminal over and over again,

since syncing only works for no more than 50 contacts at a time. That being said I have over 600 so I had to run the damn thing 12 times

in a row. Aside from that should you choose to add a new contact it won’t sync with Google automatically and upload your new contact

into the cloud where you can have access to it at anytime.

//*Note: AFAIK: iOS, WM and Android have pretty easy ways to sync contacts with Google. I think this is one of the things the guys at Canonical should focus on. Slick mail application and neat contacts syncing is vital to a lot of people and is a major reason why they never switch phones.

Final thoughts:

Ubuntu Touch aims to deliver something different and really special to consumers: a PC inside a phone. I think what they are truly

missing here is an app store of some kind. The OS suggests apps but I couldn't see an app for that and I'm guessing that is somewhat of a

setback as well. They’ve been doing really well and while for now the “Cons” section is significantly larger than the “Pros”

I have hope and faith that Canonical will pull this off eventually.

Aside from the hard installation and the lack of an eye-candy boot animation… and maybe some other minor tickles - the OS looks

and feels nice and really pretty in the palm of one’s hand. They still have a lot of work to do if they ever want to catch up with Android or iOS

in terms of usability, syncing, MTP and other stuff that average consumers don’t know and don’t need to worry about but would miss a lot.

If you don’t don't mind the fact it’s a developers preview and the camera doesn’t always start off properly and you have to shut it down and run it again it’s pretty impressive!

Conclusion:

There are a lot of words one can use to describe Ubuntu Touch, but in my opinion the high order bid is “Inspiring”.

Yes, there are some glitches here and there. There is a lot to do. But after seeing it and touching it with my own eyes and fingers well…

I have to say this – I am thrilled and I can’t hardly wait to see what will they make of it.

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