Canonical today is unveils Ubuntu for tablets, a touch-based interface supporting screen sizes of anywhere from 6-inches to 20-inches, and use cases targeting both businesses and the home. Android and iOS have already demonstrated that the same OS can work on both form factors. But the story is a little more interesting when you consider what Ubuntu offers.
With unique multitasking productivity, effortless navigation, and defence-ready security, Ubuntu raises the bar on tablet design and sets a new standard for the post PC era.
Ubuntu Tablets Video
Features
Ubuntus unique side stage places a phone and a tablet app on the same screen at the same time for amazing tablet productivity.
Take calls in Skype while you work in a document, make notes on the side while you surf the web, tweet while you watch a movie.
Or use apps collaboratively drag content from one app to another for a super-productive day. Weve reinvented the tablet as a bridge between phone and PC.
Secure Internet
Your Ubuntu tablet has multiple secure user accounts, and a guest account. Perfect for families and friends, and ideal for the office, with secure multi-user logins that make using and sharing devices safe.
Data protection is world class with full disk encryption, and additional encryption for personal data, making Ubuntu perfect for sensitive environments and regulatory compliance in the medical, military, industrial and finance sectors.
Design
Use all four edges of the screen to navigate between apps, settings and controls. There are no buttons on the Ubuntu tablet, you dont have to keep returning to the home screen every time you want to switch apps everything is available at a swipe. Leaner, cleaner, more elegant hardware designs are possible with Ubuntu the result is a joy to use.
Instant launch
The left edge holds your favourite apps, so all the things you use most are only a touch away. Here you can see whats running, switch between apps or launch your favourites quickly.
Usability
Swipe through the top for any system service, search or setting. Switch networks, turn mobile data on, mute the volume, respond to incoming messages, or block notifications without leaving your application. In fact, any system setting can be changed directly, without losing your place in the app. Ubuntu feels cleaner, more spacious and less cluttered because we dont need buttons on every screen your content is king. Swiping up from the bottom edge reveals app controls.
Dont swipe, you dont see any buttons or toolbars. Youre free to focus on the stuff that matters your photos, web pages, music, messages, and apps.
Gallery on Ubuntu Tablets
The Gallery app is a stylish native Ubuntu application that lets you organise and share photos. Its a great example of convergent app design and engineering: one app works on phone, tablet, and desktop and its equally beautiful and usable in every environment.
On the phone, you can browse photos, and on the tablet, you can create albums Ubuntu will organise your pictures into events by date, or you can create custom collections.
Your photos are all instantly uploaded to your personal cloud, and available on all your devices including those running iOS, Android and Windows. Share them with one touch.
Voice
The Ubuntu HUD makes complex application workflows simple on touch devices. This brings all the power of the PC to your touch device. Take the tablet where it has never been before image manipulation, movie editing, document management, CAD. With an interface that scales from the tablet to a PC, Ubuntu brings potent apps into focus on touch devices.
Cloud connections
Sharing is now built-in, with support for all the major networks. So any app can let you share with friends, family, and co-workers. One touch is all it takes.
Facebook and Twitter arent the only ways to share. Ubuntu One already has millions of users on Ubuntu, Android, Windows, and Mac. Deeply integrated on Ubuntu devices, it provides free storage, paid-for music streaming services and a foundation for cloud-based services from operators and device makers.
Apps
Web applications sit alongside native apps as equal citizens on Ubuntu with their own icons and access to system services. Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, Gmail, and Spotify are all available from day one thanks to Ubuntus brilliant web app system, developers can easily make their site install on the tablet as an app.
Ubuntu arent limited to HTML5. Native apps are blazingly fast, taking advantage of the full capabilities of the tablets processor and graphics hardware. A mobile SDK does most of the work for you, giving you that Ubuntu style. Its easy for Android and Blackberry developers to publish for the Ubuntu audience too, and since youre already running Ubuntu on your development workstations, everything you need is at your fingertips.
Already a very popular platform for web, Blackberry and Android mobile development, youll want to bring all your apps to Ubuntu. A great app will use the unique features in Ubuntu to create a fresh, uncluttered, purposeful and fast experience. Make one app binary for all form factors web or native. You have it all at your fingertips when you run Ubuntu on.
Web apps are first class citizens on Ubuntu, with APIs that provide deep integration into the system. HTML5 apps written for other platforms can be adapted to Ubuntu with ease, and were targeting standard cross-platform web app development frameworks like PhoneGap to make Ubuntu Just Work for those apps.
Ubuntu unique web app system lets you adapt any web property for installation as an app on Ubuntu, running independently of the browser, with its own icon and access to system services. Which means that all the big names will be available to Ubuntu phone and tablet users at launch.
For rich applications with gorgeous movement and transitions, and graphics-heavy games, Ubuntu provides an amazing native developer toolset. QML provides a slick, easy development environment for native apps with engines in C or C++, and JavaScript for UI glue where performance isnt critical. Ubuntu also give you full native OpenGL, which the top games companies are using to make incredible games.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about writing native apps for Ubuntu is the opportunity to write and build a single app with responsive interfaces that allow it to run on any Ubuntu device. In other words, you can use the Ubuntu SDK to build your app and, with some care and attention, make it available to users of Ubuntu PCs, phones, and tablets all in a single upload to the Ubuntu Software Centre.
Ubuntu integrates online content across all our devices. Take advantage of Canonicals service framework and get your content in front of millions of users.
Cloud
The Ubuntu One personal cloud service provides every Ubuntu user with free storage space and the option to buy more. But for developers, Ubuntu One offers much more. The U1DB cloud-syncing database provides APIs to sy
nc any kind of data to the cloud not just files.
If youre a mobile operator and want a fast way to develop cloud-based services for your users, Ubuntu One enables you to develop integrated, differentiating services, without the need to maintain your own infrastructure manage identity, payments and service activation securely.
