If you were hoping that your next smartphone would be an Ubuntu Edge, today will come with some disappointing news. Canonical’s Indiegogo campaign to build a ultra-high end smartphone powered by its Ubuntu mobile operating system closed today without meeting its target. It raised nearly US$13 million, a crowdfunding record, but it still came up short of the US$32 million it was hoping to raise.
So ends a crazy month. We’ve broken records, we’ve been written and talked about across the world, we’ve worn out our F5 keys, and we’ve learned a lot of invaluable lessons about crowdfunding. Our bold campaign to build a visionary new device ultimately fell short, but we can take away so many positives.
Among those positives, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth thinks that the attention the campaign got “will still be a huge boost as other Ubuntu phones start to arrive in 2014.”
The Ubuntu Edge promised to be quite the smartphone. Powered by “best quad-core processor on the market” and dual-booting into Android and Ubuntu mobile, it would have come with a 4.5-inch HD (720×1280) display, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of onboard storage, dual-LTE connectivity, a sapphire glass body, and a silicon-anode battery.
Should Ubuntu have set itself a more achievable goal? Even at the reduced cost of US$695, the Ubuntu Edge remained an expensive and untested proposition. Perhaps Canonical’s campaign would have done better with a less powerful but also less expensive device.
One thing is for sure: We’ve not heard the last of Ubuntu mobile.
Source : Indiegogo