Canonical plans to release an early build of Ubuntu Phone OS 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.

Ubuntu countdown

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

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

7 replies on “Canonical to announce a tablet, or tablet OS?”

  1. 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.

  2. The OS is called Ubuntu 13.04 🙂 . Wasn’t their whole Unity UI supposed to be their way to make their OS touch friendly?

    1. 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.

  3. It seems the countdown timer was extended? Looks like a 7am PST reveal now, on the 19th (tomorrow)

Comments are closed.