Yeah, no: I live in Argentina and nobody, NOBODY here is going to get a FirefoxOS phone. The deal with emerging markets is that people here still cares about personal image which is the only reason why iPhones are still being sold despite being several times the price of Android phones due to import taxes. Couple that with Chinese Android phones that are getting better and cheaper every month and why would anyone get a phone that due to volume won't be cheaper and that will have only a fraction of the support?
UP's achilles heel is the lack of proprietary hardware, 99% of the users out there can't even root their phones let alone install a completely different OS on it. Couple that with the innability to run Android apps and the horrible UX that is unity and you have a package nobody wants.
Sailfish has no chance at all of growing beyond a very small niche of people. Tizen is basically Samsung's attempt at getting Google out of the picture now that is the biggest fish in the phone sea.
BB10 is a better option than most of these OS', even WebOS should be in this list and yet for some reason it was left aside.
Glad to see Tizen and Sailfish mentioned. As an N900 owner, I'm currently torn between them; I've always loved the sleek shininess of Enlightenment, but Sailfish is the obvious upgrade path. Or maybe I should just roll my own: https://wiki.debian.org/pkg-n900
Don't forget about Open webOS [1]. At the very least the progress of its Galaxy Nexus port is curious to watch [2], though I wonder how the recent acquisition of rights to webOS by LG might influence the project.
Of these, Sailfish has the most serious and experienced team behind it. It won't leave the shop unfinished. It is do or die for Jolla. For everyone else phone OSs are a hobby.
Everyone else is learning by doing. Even Samsung. Samsung's feature phones run RTOSs licensed by Samsung, and, of course, while Samsung has made some impressive modifications to Android, that's far from showing they can make a complete modern phone OS.
I don't know if/how you can say that Ubuntu Touch is a "hobby". And outside of Apple and MS, there is literally no other company as experience at creating an operating system as Canonical and the Ubuntu community.
Based on the early revs, Ubuntu is by far the most polished.
Canonical is also led by someone with a driving vision, very deep pockets and an absolute want to make a mark on mobile.
So, Ubuntu has the most experienced team, the most polished early rev product and a focused founder. No way that Ubuntu Touch isn't the front runner here. Frankly, it isn't even close (or fair) to compare the rest to Ubuntu.
I agree with the grandparent. This matters more to Jolla; it's literally their company. If Sailfish doesn't catch on they will go out of business. I'd feel better if I knew in advance that everything they are working on is open source.
While Ubuntu has experience bundle's open source software and to a smaller extent creating their own, they don't have any experience in mobile, which is a different ball game entirely. Early progress is impressive though, I will agree.
Go listen to the Unity haters (I'm not one anymore, it finally seems to work well once you pry the Amazon spyware out of it) about Canonical's ability to innovate without shipping something half-baked.
Ubuntu Touch is heavily dependent on Canonical being able to do major surgery on the Linux graphics stack on a very tight schedule. I agree with their plan and the reasoning behind it, but there are many reasons to doubt they can execute on schedule.
As for the team, Ubuntu has some experienced phone OS developers but nowhere near the depth Jolla has.
The way that Ubuntu used SurfaceFlinger as a provisional system compositor is brilliant. But getting from there to a product is more work than Canonical has ever had to put into a project.
It's funny to hear Samsung and Intel described as "hobby" developers. Intel and Nokia achieved a shipping platform with the N9 and I think some other partners may have shipped a Meego product before it was killed by Microsoft cash/Elop.
Samsung shipped successful BadaOS phones under the Wave line. People on HN should be uniquely qualified to know what it means to actually ship a product and not dismiss it so out of hand.
Bada was an extensive userland sitting on top of either Linux or proprietary BSD-ish kernels and was the culmination of probably a decade of effort. I never saw anything other than prototypes running on top of Linux kernels though. The shipping product was entirely proprietary and achieved some decent share in a few markets (Brazil and Europe I think) for the total lack of marketing.
As-shipped, Bada ran on, as far as I know, a feature-phone OS kernel, probably Nucleus from Mentor Graphics, but I don't know for sure. The Bada runtime and APIs are no great shakes. Much less well-developed than Qt, and no basis for a modern smartphone runtime.
Before iPhone, mobile OEMs were not expected to know what to do with software. The exception, at the time, was Nokia, which by itself constituted the entire first tier of the mobile handset business.
As for Intel, I'm sure many people on this forum have their own stories of Intel and an un-serious dabbler in OSs. The example I know of is their brief ownership of a DSP OS. Microsoft convinced them they really shouldn't be trying to define multimedia APIs and software for PCs, and that was soon over.
The bottom line is, there is a firm basis in history for thinking neither Samsung nor Intel, much less the two "working together," such as that cooperation is, can produce a serious mobile OS product.
Both Ubuntu Touch [1] and Firefox OS currently has ports to numerous models of phones which you can flash if you unlock it (albeit most highly unofficial).
Usually these are Android-phones, already open-source friendly and easy to build for. You will find all the relevant details in the appropriate sub-forums on XDA. If you want to try them today, you can.
This should definitely not be confused for vapourware.
I picked up a Z10 a few days ago and have been using it as my primary (only) phone. I'll say that it has a ton of promise. It's perfectly snappy, the screen's resolution is stunning (although the colors aren't as good as what you'd get from an AMOLED phone), the automatic screen brightness always works perfectly, and the OS is great at just getting out of the way. That said, I feel like it's still a beta product.
From my own experience and from reading various forums, enabling encryption has a decent chance of putting your phone in a state where it will randomly and frequently reboot. At least, that's the theory; I'm in the process of disabling encryption now, so soon I should know whether that makes the reboots go away. Other than that, some of the setup is a bit weird, and other things just take some getting used to.
The app store (BlackBerry World) is a bit empty. I've found most of the apps that I need, but if you're looking for a specific app (especially anything from Google), prepare to be disappointed. I haven't started doing any development, but the docs generally look good, and I'm really excited to get my feet wet with Qt Quick on a phone. I think they made the right choice there, although I haven't actually gotten into it yet.
So, overall, I do think the Z10 has great potential. Something about the entire UI just feels respectful of the user; it stays out of the way and it almost always does exactly what I want it to do (unique in my personal experience with touch-based devices).
The Z10 has a 1280x768 resolution on a 4.2 inch screen. That is a 355ppi pixel density. That is better than the iphone 5(326ppi) and Galaxy S3(306ppi). Samsung's S4 although is a different story.
I've been excited about high DPI for a long time; finally seeing it happen really does make me happy. There's just something unreal about seeing a thumbnail of Orbital's Blue Album cover (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/60/Orbital_-_Blue...) rendered in a 1" square on my phone's display, and being able to see all the details in the rings on an image that size. Looking at the specs of the S4 screen (441 dpi, plus being AMOLED), I'm betting it blows away the Z10 by a fair margin. Progress is a wonderful thing.
I've been using a device for several months, and have been developing on BlackBerry 10 for even longer. It's a joy to use and develop for.
I write most of my apps in Python, and they work beautifully. I'm able to rapidly prototype and make changes as needed. Having done a lot of Android development, I can say the BlackBerry development tools and methods are actually easier and better to use. I think iOS dev is still more mature though.
Sales for my app have been decent. I need to push out an update soon, and do some more marketing to help it out though.
As a user, the device is great. I'm running the release OS on a Dev Alpha B, but I'll be getting a limited edition device once I ship this prototype back. It's smooth, fast, and works the way I expect it too. Again, having several Android devices, I can say that that OS never worked quite the way I did.
Could you give more details as to how you develop with Python? Is it done via PySide? My impression was that you could only use C++/Qt, HTML5/JavaScript or Adobe AIR for BB10. I plan to get a Z10 soon with the intention to port an application from Windows Phone along the way. I was mentally preparing for C++, but if Python works good enough then I may skip C++ altogether (I did some small PySide apps in the past, but this time I'd like to learn QML).
There are two approaches to using any interpreter. One is to using python wrappers and existing python GUI toolikits simply by using the "official" QNX/Python hook entry point into the app lifecycle. [0]
The other is to go deeper and integrate with cascades UI and process messages between the QML/Qt framework and a python event loop. [1] Project going this route can be found at
http://hg.microcode.ca/blackberry-py/src/
Other "semi-supported" interpreters include Lua and Erlang. [2] I'm sure someone has a ruby vm by now.
I had the chance to play with a Z10 recently and I must say I was quite surprised by how polished the experience seemed.
a. The OS felt as responsive as Windows Phone and all the custom gesture recognition works as advertised(e.g. Peek).
b. The apps I used included Twitter, the Blackberry Hub (e-mail, contact etc.), the Camera app and Evernote. Of these, the Evernote app seemed to be a little rough (mainly UI glitches), but the rest worked well.
I haven't used the Developer Toolchain for QNX/BB10, but have friends who seem to think that it's not too bad. They are waiting for sales figures to decide whether or not they should think about releasing a BB10 app.
From the user point of view I haven't used it much but it felts decent though not really convincing. From the dev point of view, it doesn't feel great from what I've seen, and people I know building mid-size projects for it are hating it with a passion.
So it's still rough and there's not much good will on the dev side.
The question was why BB10 is not in the list, and that was a quick answer from my POV.
If you want the long one:
I do maintenance for older (OS4~7) BB apps so I have an interest in where the platform goes. I'm following the evolution of the new OS and SDK since the playbook to the alpha device and up to the Z10, but even after the bbconf workshops on webworks or the sessions on cascade I don't see a future for native dev on this platform, and most of our clients just want their android app ported to BB10.
From the dev perspective, I don't see a good ROI in deeply learning the platform, so I'll be happy with watching over the shoulders of the guys dealing with it.
Hearsay is OK for me when I see the support tickets flying around. Like there is no simple way to have the scroll position of a listview in cascades...that's just crazy when so many apps will be managing lists.
As a user, I'm not in the target audience since they never bothered to add japanese input support, but I tried most of devices by pure curiosity.
I genuinely wonder what particular feature is so well executed that you wanted to dismiss my opinion. I've seen some feature here and there that aren't bad, the focus on gestures is distinctive and there is a definitive push for a "modern" feel...but I'm not a big fan of the swipe up/down gestures, as actual content can be found near these areas, and it conflicts with other operations (like drawing on the screen).
Even the task switching is tiresome at times, as app order is not fully predictable (or you have an excelent memory)
Is there any aspect that is not decent but really great?
Interesting that if you count iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BB OS 10 as the top four mobile OSes, they run four different kernels, BSD/XNU/Darwin, Linux, WinNT and QNX. The four new competitors all seem to be using Linux (five if you count WebOS).
I suspect that's a cost-saving measure as much as anything else. If you're a scrappy small project, reusing the existing Linux kernel is probably a good move.
Actually it is more leveraging your existing experience. I don't know about Blackberry, but the common kernel between your desktop OS and the mobile OS is a good thing.
One of the drivers in making the purchase of qnx for RIM apparently was the integration play in the embedded space. Automotive for example.
Have seen not much fruit of that other than the QNX car project [0]. I remember seeing a Porshce at CES a year or two ago that had the system in it and it integrated with the Blackberry Playbook pretty well.
For my next phone, I'll leave iOS and get a garbage feature phone (Symbian, or something). This will be when I get my next iPad, which will have 4G (I'll also need a small iPod for music).
I will just suffer adding phone numbers and writing SMS the old fashioned way -- along with the week of battery life...
>I'll leave iOS and get a garbage feature phone (Symbian, or something)
It's funny that you say that because as a long-time Symbian user I remember when "Symbian" was pretty much synonymous with "smartphone", at least in my part of the world.
As for your idea, well, I'm afraid devices that run recent editions of Symbian (Symbian^3/Anna/Belle, Symbian Series 60 5th Edition) usually don't deliver very good battery life. You'd have better luck with an S60 3rd Edition phone, especially a business-oriented one like the Nokia E72 or the E5 (I own the latter and can recommend it for sheer repairability -- see my earlier HN comment [1]) but it still won't run for a week on a single charge like Nokia's grayscale featurephones do; it's closer to 3-4 days with a fair amount of web browsing with Opera Mini and using GMail. On the plus side, I've written Python programs both for and on my E5 (the QWERTY keyboard is pretty nice) and you'll be able to do the same, unlike with a featurephone.
Symbian phones will be getting pretty rare won't they? Especially in the US where they never had much of a market to begin with.
The 808 PureView was announced to be the last Symbian phone some time ago. Vertu the "luxury" brand that Nokia sold to private equity has dropped Symbian as well. They were the last ones producing Symbian products of which I am aware. The Vertu Ti is the first Android handset produced by Nokia actually.
A titanium case and reuses some of the internals of the Lumia 920.
If you are on a Mac, you could check if the emitSMS dashboard widget still works. That's what I used to do in the OS X 10.4 & Nokia dumbphone days :) - write SMS from my Mac whenever I had it running.
UP's achilles heel is the lack of proprietary hardware, 99% of the users out there can't even root their phones let alone install a completely different OS on it. Couple that with the innability to run Android apps and the horrible UX that is unity and you have a package nobody wants.
Sailfish has no chance at all of growing beyond a very small niche of people. Tizen is basically Samsung's attempt at getting Google out of the picture now that is the biggest fish in the phone sea.
BB10 is a better option than most of these OS', even WebOS should be in this list and yet for some reason it was left aside.