The first Ubuntu-powered smartphone arrived earlier this year after two years of planning and a failed crowdfunding campaign. Canonical, the group behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution and the aforementioned handset, isn’t planning for it to take nearly as long for its second smartphone to drop.
In fact, it’s set to launch in just one week.
The Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition is being built by Spanish handset maker BQ, the same company that pumped out the original Ubuntu phone. The new model will feature a 5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1,280 x 720 and will be powered by the same quad-core MediaTek SoC clocked at 1.3GHz alongside 1GB of RAM.
Buyers will get 16GB of onboard storage, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 5-megapixel selfie shooter up front and dual SIM card slots. The phone will run the same operating system as the original and as before, there’s no LTE.
As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, we’re dealing with a budget-minded handset here (it’s actually just a repurposed Android smartphone). Fortunately, its price point reflects this. Competing with the likes of Android and iOS is extremely difficult (just ask Samsung’s Tizen, Mozilla’s Firefox OS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone) but you have to at least applaud Canonical for trying.
The Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition will go on sale June 9 through BQ’s online store at a price of €199.90 (around $219).
https://www.techspot.com/news/60868-canonical-second-ubuntu-smartphone-launch-next-week.html
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