Canonical plans to release an early build of Ubuntu Phone OSÂ on February 21st. But that’s not all the company plans to do this week: on February 19th, Canonical is preparing to announce something related to tablets.
That’s about as specific as we can get at the moment, but Canonical has posted a countdown timer on its website with the text “Tick, tock, tablet time!”
Update: Canonical has introduced Ubuntu for Tablets, a version of its desktop operating system optimized for touchscreen devices, and capable of running both desktop and smartphone-like apps.
The last time Canonical ran a countdown timer on the Ubuntu homepage, the company unveiled Ubuntu Phone OS.
So what’s next? Canonical has already released preview builds of Ubuntu designed to run on the Google Nexus 7 tablet. So could the company be planning to launch its own tablet? Will Canonical unveil hardware partners that plan to ship tablets with Ubuntu? Or could we just see a new build of Ubuntu 12.10 for the Nexus 7?
We should find out on February 19th.
Canonical has been pretty vocal recently about plans to make its software compatible with phones and tablets as well as desktop and notebook computers. It looks like 2013 is the year that’s all going to start happening.
via OMG Ubuntu
Ideally you’d want to kill all 3 birds w/ a stone but starting w/ 1 ARM-centric solution are more than feasible at least. It sorts out that “phone” or “tablet” OS branding mess once and for all so I do hope that Canonical/Ubuntu recognize the conundrum from what they can observe from entrenched rivals.
I wonder if it’s related to HTC’s event tomorrow.
So happy about it, fingers crossed for an actual tablet.
If it’s related to HTC’s event tomorrow then it might be an HTC tablet.
The OS is called Ubuntu 13.04 🙂 . Wasn’t their whole Unity UI supposed to be their way to make their OS touch friendly?
I always felt that way about Unity. But, touch-friendly is half-way to getting to a tablet interface. For example, Windows from XP had touch-friendly features, including pen input, but it wasn’t until Windows 8 that it became a proper tablet OS.
It seems the countdown timer was extended? Looks like a 7am PST reveal now, on the 19th (tomorrow)