Sounds brilliant. I will get one later. love the screen size!

Last night, in place of sleeping, I found some time to set up email on the MX4...

The Dekko email client seems really good - can we have it on Jolla too please?

The Meizu MX and current Ubuntu Phone image has a battery read bug, GPS fails under wifi, and uninstalling scopes leads to a runaway process (phone gets hot). These bugs are known, but be aware.

In all, I would say this is an interesting OS and if one largely uses it for phoning, sms, as a camera, reading news, viewing youtube etc, then it serves. The lack of whatsapp etc will be a major problem for common usage (and yes, I know the arguments against such apps!) as the wider world uses them.

Polished? No. Rather bare-bones OS at present with some frustrating lack of options in some of the services and apps. As said by others, very reliant on web-apps at present.

Scopes: I think the idea is fine, even good but it is a bit laborious paging between them to get at say, the 2nd last scope to the right in a list of 6/7. I think this is a major design flaw (but addressable?).

There is a choppiness about the interface, that is absolutely not evident on iOS devices. Some bugs are filed against these issues. What is interesting is that such comments have existed since Nexus 4 days and that this occurs on the Meizu device (a cpu "beast" in comparison) says something about the software, methinks.

Terminating apps (with one hand): a swipe from right produces a stacked view of each active screen, including the "home" screen (the one with scopes). Apps get terminated by upwards flicking of the relevant page. Three issues for now: 1) it is not always quickly evident which is the home screen and one can needlessly flick at it (not being killable it bounces back down; 2) it is sometimes awkward to "get a grip" on a screen to do the flick (they then shift left/right in the scrolling action) and 3) there is no way to kill the active app in one gesture - you have to swipe right, re-position the thumb (whatever digit) and then flick upwards and this is a tad irritating.

Using both hands this works way better: you swipe from right pushes the screen towards the left thumb waiting to flick it up.

Finally (for now) - looking at the launchpad bugs for Ubuntu Touch, and what gets fixed, when - it occurs to me that Canonical perhaps lacks the muscle to fight the good fight against other Phone/Tablet OSs. This impression is reinforced when one considers the overall state of Ubuntu Phone after quite a few years of work and publicity.

Prediction: will fail to gain traction, unless in markets where state actors support non-US phone/tablet software. And Jolla may have their foot in that door ahead of Canonical?

"Sent from Ubuntu Touch device using the Forum Browser app"

I got a further couple of hours from the last few % on the battery display, so in the end 16 hours of mixed use.

Battery properties has a discharge curve graph which clearly showed something amiss - voltage was falling faster after I finished my long call in the morning.

So suspect real world life will be much better than that, when everything is working as it should.

how does the browser handle forms? edit text here at TMO?

Well, I can reply to your question straight from the browser with no problems
The virtual keyboard is a little too keen to pop up (such as when I try to pan around to choose a smiley) but I find thats true of most devices I've tried.

Virtual keyboard is pretty good, I would say.

Strangely, the browser absolutely will not display properly the webmin page (using Authentic Theme) of my server. MicroB and Opera on the n900 do a far better job considering their age.

How would you compare the UI for this phone with the N9. The N9 had the most beautiful and intuitive gesture based UI I ever tried.

Hmmm, seems rougher round the edges than initially hoped.

How does this "beta test" compare to the current state of:
Harmattan on Nokia N9 ?
SailfishOS on Jolla ?
SailOS on Nexus 4 or Nexus 5 ?

Thanks for all the impressions thus far!

I don't know those other OSs being a n900-lover.

One additional point: it is quite slow at bringing up stock apps like phone or messaging from the left-hand taskbar. About 2/3 secs, even if repeated (again, this is said of other devices, so why on this powerful device?). Thus key function apps are not cached in memory. This time to open is slow IMO, so I guess the expectation is that you keep them open and scroll to the needed functional screen from the right swipe.

Also, out of the box, you do not have access to the standard ubuntu repos. That has to be enabled (making device r/w, developer mode etc). As yet, I have no idea if "desktop" apps would run or how they would be handled by Unity8 in phone mode.