Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth revealed that Ubuntu OS based smartphones will start shipping in October. It's not yet clear which smartphones will run Ubuntu's mobile offering, but app developers will get access to the OS late this month after the publication of a downloadable image for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
Shuttleworth said the new phone operating system will ship in two large geographic markets in October, and although he didn't specify whether North America was one of those, he said North America is "absolutely a key market for Ubuntu".
Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system used to run servers and other infrastructure in many corporate IT departments, will be available on a full range of devices, including desktop and tablet computers, potentially providing corporate IT executives a way to reduce the number of devices they purchase and manage. The smartphones can be docked to larger displays, wirelessly connected to keyboards and other peripherals, and have Windows-based applications streamed to them from corporate servers. This would mean users could access all manner of corporate data through a single, pocket-sized device. “You can share Windows apps to the phone desktop,” said Mr. Shuttleworth during a meeting in New York Tuesday. Other operating systems running on smartphones, such as Microsoft Corp. ’s Windows Apple Inc. ’s iOS and Google ’s Android, are at least slightly different versions of the same operating systems running tablets or PCs, and those differences often mean the same data can’t run on all three form factors.
