With the arrival of the Xperia ZL, it its time to give my Nexus 4 a new meaning and soul (also a hobby for my to play around during my downtime). Here comes Ubuntu Touch!
Installing it was very straight forward as my phone was already rooted and installed custom recovery, just download 2 files into the internal storage and flash away.
Initial impression was that this OS do have a lot of potentials, not to mention a nice breakaway from the usual smartphone interface. It's not that hard to fiddle around especially for those who played with the desktop/laptop version of Ubuntu.
At the moment the best I could describe the OS at this stage is a feature phone with huge screen! They ain't that many function native apps and at the moment the working apps rely heavily on the websites' mobile version (a resemblance off the WAP days on the feature phone).
What really amazed me was not how the OS is performing currently, but the actual people working behind the project. If one said Android was very community-driven, these guys are the servants of the community!
The way they allows general users to participate, dogfooding, debugging and how they interact and react to the feedback and ideas can only be dreamed of in the business world.
A very clever move indeed!
By carrying out this kind of practice not only can speed up their development and debugging rate by folds, but what's more clever is that the marketing value they gain from this process!
There's hardly any extra overhead in carrying this exercise out, but it gives the participants a sense of belonging and loyalty as they will definitely feel this OS is their own. The brand and the OS is penetrating into the small yet vocal tech/geek community, this can only be good if done right.
At least I'm sold!
