The group of volunteers keeping Canonical’s (canceled) dream of Ubuntu smartphones and tablets alive is rolling out a pretty significant update this week. The UBPorts team says Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 should be available for all supported devices by Sunday, January 13.

Among other things, it brings new features and improvements to the on-screen keyboard and web browser. But the bigger news may be an update that should make it easier for developers to port the operating system so it can run on newer phones.

Up until now the list of officially supported devices has been a little… old.

For example, Ubuntu Touch runs on the OnePlus One, Google Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and Nexus 7 2013 as well as a few devices from Meizu and Bq that originally shipped with Ubuntu software before Canonical canceled development of the mobile version of the operating system.

The newest phone on the list is probably the Fairphone 2… a smartphone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor (a chip that was released on 2014).

UBPorts says an update to the Libhybris tool will allow Ubuntu Touch to “use most drivers from Android 7.1 devices,” which should make it easier to port the software to run on devices with more modern hardware.

More visible changes in OTA-7 include support for keyboard theming, allowing you to change the color and style of the keyboard. There are nine themes to choose from at launch.

The Morph web browser has also received a number of bug fixes which should make it much more usable.

You can read more about Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 in the release notes.

 

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 16,211 other subscribers

4 replies on “Ubuntu Touch OTA-7 brings keyboard themes, browser improvements”

  1. Android 7.1 devices, eh? Not exactly brand new, but I have an Axon 7 here that might be fun to play around with this with, seeing as how ZTE will never be updating it. It’s stuck on Nougat which, hey, is 7.x.

  2. I was wondering if anyone knows how well this would run on a Nexus 7 2013. The 2015 Android update was the last Google sent out and even though I have wiped mine clean and updated the apps it is slower than a sloth.

Comments are closed.