Ubuntu Phone Gets Blasted In Reviews This Week

[carewolf]

Butthurt?

You really like misinformation and clickbait?

[blackiwid]

here another terrible review but in german:

http://www.golem.de/news/meizu-mx4-mit-ubuntu-im-test-knapp-daneben-ist-wieder-vorbei-1507-115243.html

"
Scopes are very limited, you cant add other sources, that only works in a completly seperated rss scope.
In the video and music scope we cannot define which services to use abe which not.
"

and here the fatal part:

"
that the Ubuntu Phone also not runs fluid on the good hardware of the MX4 is in relation to the long development phase nearly mysterioes. since sept. 2014 canonical allowes oems to sell hardware with that OS, but we think that it is not a competitor. Often the transitions between the scopes are not fluent, somethimes the mx4 reacts slowly and with feelable delay. Also when you want to view the open apps overview it often stutters.
"

and more:

"
the mx4 has a akku with a cappacy of 3100 mAh. ...in our videotest playind 1080p video with full brightness it run 4 hours, compared to other smartphones that is a low value. In the reality the smartphone runs a day.
"

to the accessability for developers:

"
the jolla was easier to access

and

its bad documented, mostly only as aswers in the forum
"

in the fazit:

"
lastly the phone stays a fiasco... for us its not even nearly "there"
"

[bregma]

I've been using Ubuntu Touch on my Google Nexus 4 for about a year and a half. I can make and receive calls, send and receive SMS, browse the internet, play games, check gmail and facebook, it integrates with my car when I get in, and I take a lot of pictures with it. Not sure how it compares with iOS or Android, but I imagine they're capable of doing those things too (my wife has an Android phone and has trouble doing anything with it, including answering it... or maybe that's just when I call).

I have no idea if the Ubuntu phone is "ready" yet, but I use it as my every day phone and I have few complaints.

[pracedru]

Having bought the BQ phone with Ubuntu, I can only agree with the reviews. There are still many bugs.
Performance is very disappointing. One would expect fluent graphics when using a new and optimized display manager as MIR and Qt GUI elements.
But this is far from the case. There is a rather large lag on input, and to often the interface locks.

[theghost]

Does Ubuntu Phone offer a decent route planning software (e.g. Google Maps) and GPS support?

Imho, I am not suprised that it is pretty buggy right now. I used Ubuntu in the past quite long and seriously every piece of software (Unity, Ubuntu One, the keyboard layout indicator, ...) they developed and released was broken at least for two releases.

[schmidtbag]

Wasn't Canonical trying to get Android apps to run on Ubuntu? Maybe if they actually accomplished that, this wouldn't have been so negatively reviewed. My main gripe with Canonical is how they try doing things their own way regardless of the Linux community's suggestions. Then they realize they were wrong, and stop working on the thing (whatever it may be) half way while resulting in an incomplete product. This is getting embarrassing.

It wouldn't surprise me if Mir gets dropped eventually. Intel seems to be the only company that has any "interest" in supporting it.

[89c51]

Buy a Jolla phone if you want linux. Let ubuntu die a peaceful death.

[nik90]

I have been using Ubuntu Touch on my BQ E4.5 for the past couple of months as my daily phone. Every OTA update brings new features and critical bug fixes thereby improving my daily experience. Yes at the moment, it is lacking a lot of high-profile apps, but as far as basic tasks go like making/receiving calls, sms, taking pictures, managing email using a native client (Dekko), native and html5 games, alarms, native reddit app (uReadit), podcast app (Podbird) etc, it fulfils my daily needs quite nicely. The only thing that I am missing is Whatsapp (hard to get all my friends and family to switch over to telegram). Google+ and Facebook are present as web apps which are surprisingly good enough for what I use them for on my phone. Oh did I mention almost 2 days of battery life after moderate usage! I just need my phone to last for a while before I need to worry about charging it.

Obviously not everything is perfect and peachy. Performance (scrolling, frame-rate, app-startup times) is definitely that can be improved. But I am confident that future OTAs will address them. I am excited using my Ubuntu Touch. Take it for a ride for yourself and check it out. Sure tech sites like Engadget may give it a hard time, but sometimes your needs may be different from what they expect. You may not need a thousand apps for your daily usage.

On reading through the Engadget review I noticed a couple of mistakes and issues that have been fixed in the latest OTA that was pushed last week.

The pull-down has a major flaw, however, in that it's accessible at any time, even on the lock screen. It doesn't matter if you have a passcode set; anyone can pick up the device, check your unread notifications and change any of the quick settings without having access to the phone. Not ideal if you are security-/privacy-conscious.

This is false information. You can adjust the privacy options in the system settings app and disable access to notifications in the lock screen. Here is a screenshot of it https://imgur.com/L1jeLnd. This feature has been there since the beginning.

The Ubuntu browser is nice and fast, although it's simple and doesn't even support bookmarks at this point.

Again bullshit. The Ubuntu Browser has support for bookmarks since a couple of OTAs now. In the latest OTA-5 support for bookmark folders was added.

[Rezza]

After reading all bad news last weeks leading to dominance of Android and iOs only, I decided to support them. Even it's Canonical . As we really need diversity and it doesn't matter if it's Jolla, Ubuntu Phone, now Plasma Mobile and whatever else (says happy BlackBerry Passport user). So I ordered it and I'm playing with it for the last week. The main issue is performance - it slows down sometimes that it's even impossible to type on the keyboard. Otherwise I think they are on track - at least, it's already usable for daily use. Phone calls, texts, connectivity... All works. For someone that needs just phone and Android is too complicated... With responsive design, many apps are not needed anymore - web browser is more than enought. But we're back to performance...

[andre30correia]

i use a bq 4.5 since february, and the os improves a lot since them, the performance, the battery life, features, gps drive is working now. but ofc it's needs a lot of work yet, comparing to ios and android is simple stupid, look to the first versions of android and ios... and i really won't android apps in ubuntu touch, turn it in another android clone? for what?