The converged future
Warning: lanes are merging ahead.
Ever since the Ubuntu Edge campaign, Canonical has been teasing users with the concept of convergence — a true all-in-one device that can be used as a phone, a tablet or a full-fledged PC. We’ve been kept on tenterhooks ever since the campaign failed to reach its lofty crowdfunding target. The device that almost became a reality in 2013 has traversed the distance from the drawing board to the shelf. It’s the natural evolution of the smartphone and has put Ubuntu and Canonical at the forefront of the reimagined personal mobile computing experience wave.
It took this long because Canonical set up some lofty goals for itself. For a smartphone that can double up as a PC, the company wanted an OS that could give users the same experience from a smartphone as from a PC. This meant rewriting some of the critical components that contributed towards making the desktop. Unity 8 is the first piece of the convergence puzzle.
Ubuntu’s new user interface and display framework is tasked to run across all Ubuntu devices in order to power them all by the same codebase. Put simply, Unity 8’s objective is to run as the display mechanism across the entire range of Ubuntu offerings.
The developers at Canonical also extended the advantages of a common, fully contained codebase to the packaging system as well. Speaking at Mobile World Congress ( bit.ly/ShuttleworthAtMWC2016) in Barcelona, Spain earlier this year, Mark Shuttleworth — Canonical’s Gandalf-like leader — mentioned that the company realised: “For the [Ubuntu] phone, we knew we needed to create a new kind of packaging system that had a much more reliable upgrade and rollback mechanism and was much easier for developers to simplify all of the packaging.” Shuttleworth said this work evolved from the click packages used in the phone to Snappy, first used in 15.04, and Snappy 3.0 which will make its way into Ubuntu 16.04.
ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL
Ubuntu made its smartphone debut with a bunch of devices in 2015. They were quickly lapped up from online stores in Europe and Asia, and at the MWC earlier this year, the company took everyone by surprise by demoing the first fully converged Ubuntu Edition of the BQ Aquaris M10 tablet.
The device, which is now available for order, features a dynamically adaptive user interface that provides both a tablet experience and the full Ubuntu desktop experience. Not surprisingly, the tablet and Ubuntu’s convergence experience won several accolades at the show, including Tom’s Hardware ‘Best surprise of MWC’ and was dubbed the ‘Best of MWC 2016’ by Trusted Reviews.
The Ubuntu devices can be operated by gestures alone. Swiping in from the left brings up the familiar Unity Launcher and the same action from the right brings up various scopes. On the mobile devices, the scopes act like individual home screens for different kinds of content such as movies, music and social media, without having to launch individual apps.
The real magic happens when you hook up the tablet to a monitor and traditional input devices. The interface now renders as it would on a regular desktop Ubuntu installation. Fullscreen windows are placed inside windowed ones with the usual controls in the top-left corner. One of the best things about Ubuntu’s convergence experience is that it preserves the state when you switch between the device and desktop and back.
So if you are halfway through filling out a form or editing a document on the tablet, you can continue doing it as soon as you switch to the desktop mode.
Ubuntu’s convergence isn’t just about the uniformity of the interface, but also about the unity of the underlying infrastructure for the developers. Having a single, visual framework and the same set of tools for applications to run on any type of Ubuntu device, means that applications developed for mobile will scale and run on a desktop display.
“Our SDK will provide tools for developers of mobile applications to build desktop contexts for these apps,” writes Richard Collins, Canonical’s Head of Devices on the company’s blog ( bit.ly/PathToConvergence). “Similarly, developers of desktop applications can use our SDK to extend and enhance their application for mobile use. Convergence brings a whole new set of contexts for developers and our SDK will provide the fundamental tools developers need to make their apps easy to adapt and run on any display.”
Collins further explains that it’s the same exact code powering the application whether it’s running on a phone or on the desktop. This allows third-party developers to create applications which will automatically be available across all devices and form-factors. This is possible because Ubuntu doesn’t need to know if the application is coded for a mobile or desktop display, but leaves it to the application to pick a suitable interface depending on the available display device.
While the BQ Aquaris tablet is currently the only device that ships with a true convergence experience, the feature isn’t just limited to that one device. In an email exchange with
APC, Collins told us that convergence is a chipset dependency and requires the chipset supplier to enable video support for the USB Type-C component on the Board Support Package: “We expect chipset manufacturers to fully enable USB-C type functionality for future boards. At the moment there are not very many chipset products with full video support.”
CONVERGENCE ON OTHER DEVICES
What this means is that Canonical’s latest handset, the Meizu Pro 5 doesn’t support convergence. However, Collins added that the company has already shown phones as old as the Nexus 4 supporting convergence at events, so it’s certainly something you can expect to see in future.
In its bid to perfect and deliver the convergence experience to a whole lot of devices, Collins shared that Canonical is evaluating alternative technologies that they expect to turn into products in the near future: “One of the primary candidates we are working on is a Wi-Fi direct solution using specific code developed by us to deliver exceptional responsiveness over wireless.”
Ubuntu’s convergence sounds fantastic, especially to the tired arms sore from lugging around a laptop. The BQ Aquaris M10 tablet will surely be of tremendous use to the millennial road warriors who can get through a productive workday without much processing power. Those of us that need to process large amounts of data to run virtual machines or compile kernels, will probably have to wait a little longer.
Hearing Shuttleworth talk at the MWC leaves us feeling optimistic. “We are celebrating the success of Linux but we also know that we have to evolve. And with personal computing ... we are really trying to put free software right at the front of what personal computing could be. We know there are some people that might say, ‘Why do you bother with something that’s only 1% of the world?’ But 1% of the world is enough to change the world. I want to make sure that we have a highly secure, all-free software platform that can be anything that people need it to be.”