Ubuntu Mobile OS to enter the smartphone market in 2014

In a market that's already choked with three competing mobile operating systems, Canonical has announced that the Ubuntu Mobile OS will debut in 2014.

Living up to the teasers Canonical has been putting out lately, the final announcement of Ubuntu’s Mobile OS has arrived. The Ubuntu Mobile OS will be ready to ship into mobile phones as early as 2014, and is compatible with both x86 and ARM instruction sets.

Surely, there is a bunch of people who’d be excited to see the open source OS make its way into mobile phones. Ubuntu for smartphones isn’t really a wholly new OS, but rather the same old Ubuntu with a “smartphone” interface.

The first wave of the Ubuntu flavour will be coming to Android phones later this year, given that Ubuntu Mobile OS is actually built on the existing Android kernels and drivers. Currently, only the Galaxy Nexus is certified to be able to run Ubuntu for Android.

If you’re hoping for a full vanilla Ubuntu experience, you might have to wait till 2014. Currently, there is no manufacturer or carrier tie up that Canonical has in place, but 2014 is far away and given that an Android compatible version of the OS is going to be available soon, it would give the Linux distro time to gain momentum and hopefully pick up enough traction to attract OEM partners and carrier support.

Currently, the Galaxy Nexus is the official partner device for Ubuntu’s Mobile OS and Canonical hopes that developers would take the time out to develop apps for the platform while the company uses the time to flesh out any issues the OS may have.

Relevantly, this is just one of Canonical's attempts to diversify, with the team working hard on an ARM version of Ubuntu for servers, aimed specifically at ultra-low-energy setups, or for massive cloud services. AMD is also working on ARM-based server processors, providing the hardware for the abovementioned setups.

HTC Butterfly expected to launch in January-end in India, for Rs. 44,000

The HTC Butterfly is expected to hit store shelves towards the end of January 2013, becoming the first smartphone to hit store shelves in India with a 1080p HD display.

HTC is planning to bring its first phablet to India. The device is expected to hit store shelves towards the end of January, for Rs. 44,000. In the US the device is called the HTC Droid DNA but in the rest of the world, it is called the HTC Butterfly or HTC Deluxe. The device has been available globally since December 2012.

In terms of its specifications under the hood, it has a 5-inch display with a full HD resolution (1920x1080 pixels) giving it a pixel density of 441ppi. A Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz, Adreno 320GPU, and 2GB of RAM power the device. It has 16GB built-in storage expandable via a microSD card up to 32GB. The Butterfly boasts of an 8MP rear facing camera and a 2.1MP front facing camera. It also houses a 2020mAh battery. Out of the box, the Butterfly will run on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

At Rs. 44,000 the HTC Butterfly will be the most expensive Android smartphone available. Currently we have the Samsung Galaxy S IIIpriced at Rs. 31,900 and the Samsung Galaxy Note II priced at Rs. 37,400. We have the iPhone 5, which is the most expensive (non-luxury) smartphone available in India starting at Rs. 45,500.

The launch of the Butterfly comes at the heels of the largest global smartphone event, MWC 2013, which will take place in February in Barcelona, Spain. We expect to see quite a few flagship smartphones at the event such as the Samsung Galaxy S IV, Samsung Galaxy Note III, LG Optimus G2 and more.