Ubuntu Touch/Phone Reaches Its First RTM Image

[droidhacker]

What I meant was that it would have perhaps been a better idea to have the the 2012 n7 as a reference device, rather than the 2013 model. There would have been a lot more people testing it then.

There are a couple of problems with that theory, the first is that there are far fewer of the 2012 n7's out in the wild than 2013 n7's. The fact that you happen to have one doesn't mean that everyone does. I don't. I do, however, have a 2013 sitting on my desk, literally a foot away from my left arm, and a stack of about 10 of them on a table behind me (new in box).
The second problem is that the 2012 n7 was nvidia, which is much worse to maintain than the 2013's qualcomm, which is SHARED by the Nexus 4, and similar enough to the Nexus 5's MSM8974 that a lot of the code and blobs are interchangeable between all three.

[cynical]

When Ubuntu touch announced and I've seen some sketches about how it will look like I was excited. During development interface became more simple on the graphics side and in some cases I find it ugly (like the "Alarm Clock" interface) but in the other hand Android was Ugly too in its first versions so the most important thing now is to get some attention by popular manufacturers. In 2-3 years there will be improvements for sure.

The weakest points I've seen from videos is the big lag and instability. Something I believe they will improve soon. Another problem is the nearly empty marketplace. Of course that was the case for Android too in the beginning.

Actually it's changed a lot recently, and the visuals are much more skewed towards white/orange than purple like they were in the original demo. If you are running the latest utopic-proposed version like I am... well let's say that the visuals are the last thing you need to worry about. I think they look fantastic, close to what you would expect from Android or iOS. Here is a video of an outdated but still relatively new build that has some of the visual improvements I'm talking about, unfortunately the clock application in it is still outdated but trust me it looks nicer in my version. (for reference, they are on build r209 while I'm on build r247) In my experience there are no instability problems at all, but there are definitely areas where performance could still use some work like lag when transitioning between the top menu items and application launch times. (the launch animation is pretty but not that pretty lol) I think the biggest problem by far on release day will be the lack of applications. I could already use Ubuntu Touch as a daily driver if I were simply using it for phone calls but you really notice the lack of native apps in cases like Youtube, where watching videos is doable but kills your battery due to lack of hardware acceleration. On the plus side having a terminal client and file manager installed by default is refreshing and navigation between apps is already much nicer than what you get on Android.

[varikonniemi]

I really hope the performance can be improved. It was painfully slow to launch many of the system settings items for example. It also needs some indication of the loading being in progress, perhaps shade the button area after click? Same applies to the numbers in the dialer.

[cynical]

It also needs some indication of the loading being in progress

You might be using an older version. They use an animation of three spinning orbs to indicate that something is in progress.

[verde]

Found a video with Ubuntu Touch RTM