Ubuntu could easily emerge as a force to reckon with in the mobile industry. Perhaps a stand-alone Ubuntu platform won’t succeed (cause it lacks major backers), but Ubuntu for Android definitely has a chance. Just imagine using your regular Android smartphone as a full-blown Linux computer when you connect it to a bigger screen. Powerful stuff…
That said, I would like to see the upcoming Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie shipping with a similar capability. Google is already targeting laptops with its Chrome OS but at one point in the future, we expect to see the two platforms merging.
If we can take Eric Schmidt’s words that won’t happen and we’ll likely see Android getting its own desktop UI. We do hope to see something like that, but I would suggest it would be wiser for the search giant to simply acquire an existing Linux company. How about Canonical, which makes Ubuntu, one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions? Presuming that happens we would be able to get all the benefits of Ubuntu for Android by the end of this year, maybe even in the next few months.
Google definitely has the cash to pull this off, but on the other side – it also has the brain power to make its own Linux distribution and make it sing along Android. In any case, we do like the capability and can’t wait any longer for a true converged device…