Due to the uncertain North America availability of the Jolla (yes, I did book a pre-order - for what it's worth) I resolved to grab
a cheap, mint, Galaxy Nexus off ebay and dogfood the Ubuntu Touch alpha to explore it as a replacement for my N900.

If there are any specific questions, ask away and I'll spend some time digging for the answers. I intend to watch the Ubuntu core app development progress closely and possibly create qt5 interfaces myself for any programs I notice that I'm still missing from maemo/gtk/x11


Pulled my SIM from n900 Monday afternoon.
Some initial thoughts so far after 24hrs sans maemo...

Ubuntu Touch:
* exclusive use of qt5 for all ui/apps makes it look and feel exactly like what I remember from building UI's in the Qt SDK/Harmattan Simulator
* unity8 is like an unidirectional Swipe interface. Rightswipe cycles through running apps, while left-halfswipe/fullswipe dedicated to bringing up the unity launcher. Combined with the pulldown topbar for wifi/volume, etc. the overall effect is more smooth and navigable than the somewhat unintuitive Fremantle. Swipe down to close would be niiice, but I'm sure NOK has that patented.
* you can really tell the ubuntu team is currently in the act of building out their core apps, about 50% of all menu's and features are placeholders, mockups, or half functional/empty
* Already miss Gnumeric, and having a native GPS/maps program


Galaxy Nexus:
* even with unity status bar and maliit onscreen for typing, there's still a good 720x745 visible for the application, and physically within 4% of the total screen real estate of the n900. Obviously the rest of the 1280 vertical pixes becomes usable when you close maliit.
* data signal reception (T-Mobile) seems a little better indoors with thick concrete/few windows (government building) while simultaneously burning through battery less. We'll see how this does over time.. I typically charge n900 1,350mAh about 3-4 hours a day, switching to wifi or offline mode at home.
* pentile AMOLED display quality is lukewarm. Plenty bright and clear, but block colors of non-black/non-white have that faint pentile, 'linen'-like mura grid pattern. About as distracting as the n770's rainbow distortion (you get used to it); sunlight readability is around a 5/10, with n900 being 8.2/10 and n810 a cool 8.7/10
* not particularly oleophobic.

first round of Q's from #maemo, regarding the contents of "Ubuntu Touch" 24-June-2013 daily build:

Q: does it include glibc or something compatible?
A: Yes, all Ubuntu Touch software appears to be built on glibc.
dpkg reports: ii libc6:armhf 2.17-0ubuntu5 armhf Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries

the secret sauce is libhybris 0.1.0+git20130606+c5d897a-ubuntu6 (from Jolla/Carsten Munk [mer-project.blogspot.fi]), which allows standard glibc binaries to link against bionic-based "HW adaptations".. which would be... kernel modules compiled with Google's libc implementation?

Q: does it have a python port? especially pyqt
A: [EDIT: 21-JUL, QT5 only] yes, I've installed python2.7 (2.7.5-5ubuntu1) and see python-qt4 [ports.ubuntu.com] listed in apt-cache

[[EDIT: rcolistete points out i missed that pyqt4 depends libx11-6 ]

Q: python3 and qt bindings?
A: yep, python3-pyqt4 same stock repo

Q: what about qt3?
A: it doesnt look like there's an armhf build of python-qt3 available right now in ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/pool/main/p/python-qt3 for some reason.

Q: and perl
A: (yes, yes, etc.)

Q: what about a terminal emulator?
A: installed by default, ubuntu-terminal-app 0.5bzr15saucy0. Appears to be a Qt Quick 2/QML (libqt5qml5) program.

Lol, I also booked a pre-order for the Jolla. But then I bought a Nexus 4 and am now awaiting phone and sms functionality.

Why did you go with the Galaxy Nexus and not the Nexus 4? Because of above?

As much as I look forward to Ubuntu Touch working on my phone, I sure am going to miss the ability to do pen-testing on the N900! And TV remote. And FM transmitter. And TI-83 emulator. And etc.

When will the ubuntu touch for n900 be ready?

probably never

you were one of the enteties in the voting list na
probably enjoy

Mm.. miss the FM transmitter and ir remote maybe, but dont see any reason TI-emu couldnt be given a new, compatable UI or ported whole-hog if xMir or Wayland becomes available.
I didnt realize Nexus 4 did not have voice/sms functional yet, I just did not feel like paying +$$ for a broadly similar device, (no promise the experiment will work) plus the more fragile Nexus 4 body that might shatter/break if I were to drop it while dogfooding and make it a pain to resell. Plus smaller storage (I use 24GB on n900, 16GB's already a squeeze)


**that was a pain in the butt to type on the Ubuntu browser..
The qt text area does not seem to be configured to permit inserting newlines via the maliit keyboard? very tough to select the spot to exit/insert text, select anything or .. paste.

mobile google maps site had worked smoothly yesterday for checking traffic, but today I'm noticing there is no GPS support enabled at all.

Also noticing some big issues today with maintaining the 3g data connection may be due to the apt-get upgrade I ran... I'm now testing full installation of 26June daily vs. the upgrade, vs. regressing to the 24June daily.

Day 6) Basic/unpolished rotation support for apps/Maliit has now been enabled in saucy-29 [cdimage.ubuntu.com] (may have been in saucy-28; i skipped that).

System settings app has been updated with a GPS on/off toggle, but still no functional location service in the browser.

Major blockers I see, preventing full/daily replacement of N900:

• GPS

• Music app doesnt launch on Galaxy Nexus

• no qt5 email client yet (Someone started[lists.launchpad.net] independently writing a new frontend for Trojita, but a bunch of balls have since gotten dropped, evaluation/decision [launchpad.net] of the official email application/framework was never made and now four months with 0 tangible progress [status.ubuntu.com].

• xmpp, oscar support in telepathy

Burndown status here: [http://status.ubuntu.com/coreapps-13.10/] gives a good idea of how the Canonical devs are hitting(missing) their 2013OCT goal. Only core app status is given (and not even all tasks are on the blueprints..); but even an unlisted core/platform issue is going to somewhat visible.. by way of holding up one core-app or another via a Blocker.

Irritations:

• No real options for chat and no Notifications integration with email makes daily use.. limiting. m.facebook.com 'messages' dont seem to work the same as 'chat' sent to offline users so even that cant be leveraged easily for SMS replacement.

• 3g/(ofono?) issue requiring reboot to reacquire lost data signal present in saucy-24 through saucy-29. Mr. Busch [launchpad.net/] was very helpful on IRC to point me to the main Touch ofono repository [code.launchpad.net], and indicated issue may(probably) be NetworkManager. Will have to introspect the ofono dbus api a bit with mdbus2, and see if better connection functionality is really there underneath without rebooting.

Most reliable sources for information, so far:
daily-current changelog [cdimage.ubuntu.com]
launchpad public mail archive[lists.launchpad.net] (hard to subscribe without email...)
SDK feature status [wiki.ubuntu.com]



Neat note: last week ubuntu team began testing '--flipped' builds, where instead of booting CM/android and running ubuntu in a chroot the idea is now to boot the hardware directly into ubuntu, but create an lxc container for the android libs. https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg02316.html

performance already appears very nice, but assuming direct control could be a good step toward unifying their builds across devices or even open a path for eventual native glibc/linux drivers.

Interestingly, in this configuration adbd is run on the Ubuntu side.

@bjv what you are working at?? Which device?
btw carry on wating for more posts i like the day 6/5 style

AFAIK, PyQt, Qt4 and Qt3 don't work at all on Ubuntu Touch with respect to create GUI. Because they need X11. Only GUI created in Qt5 on Ubuntu Touch will work. PyQt 5.x will be compatible with Qt5. PySide is not yet compatible with Qt5 and has no schedule to be.

So, until this situation changes, we Python developers can't create GUI softwares in Python on Ubuntu Touch.