Go ahead and order an Ubuntu Edge – but you'll wish you'd bought a tablet

Mark Shuttleworth isn't lacking in chutzpah - which, when you're a multimillionaire who has been into space and set up one of the more successful companies offering Linux distributions, is perhaps allowable.

Still, he was in remarkable form on Monday when announcing a new crowdfunding scheme from his company Canonical. He aims to raise $32m by 21 August from people who want a phone. They will pay from $600 (a slice which ended at 4pm BST on 23 July, with 5,044 bought and the total raised at $3.45m) to $830 (everyone who comes afterwards, unless you want to buy two for $1,400 or buy one of the first 50 off the production line for $10,000).

Funding the project will require around 40,000 pledges for the Ubuntu Edge, a smartphone which dual boots between Android and Ubuntu - and so can be both a smartphone and a PC if you plug it into a screen and attach a (Bluetooth) keyboard.

Shuttleworth was blunt: he thinks that there just isn't enough innovation going on in the smartphone and PC space. Nobody's trying anything interesting. Except, of course, him and the Canonical team.

"We came to the view that there is an innovation gap," he said. "The pressure to produce high volume hits damages the ability to produce leading edge innovation. If you're hoping to produce up to 50 million of some device then you have a demonstrable disincentive to produce anything that hasn't been made already. There's what we think is an opportunity to connect with early adopters and enthusiasts."

Innovation? Where?

That the phone and PC business hasn't been innovating much will come as news to people such as Nokia, which earlier this month was showing off its Lumia 1020, which has a camera with 41 megapixels, the ability to retrospectively zoom into elements of a picture, and amazing low-light optics. I may have been dismissive about its wider market prospects, but it's a hell of a cameraphone. It's going to be leading-edge for at least 18 months - and perhaps longer.

Or how about Samsung, which has worked hard on producing lots of software features such as its eye-controlled Smart Scroll and Air Gesture to enhance TouchWiz (even if they aren't widely loved)? How about Microsoft, which had the front to recompile Windows to run on ARM chips to produce the Surface RT? Or Apple, which has redesigned its phone software's appearance and many aspects of its operation in a seven-month crash course that seems aimed at capturing more of the Asian market? Don't those count as innovation?

Apparently not. Shuttleworth said: "We can get things proved in the lab, but we don't have the proving grounds to get them into mass market devices. We get very excited about ideas that can combine something that's very exciting to use. There's an enthusiastic community which likes shaping its own devices - and we can combine that with crowdfunding, which is a really powerful way to connect innovators with early adopters."

No argument about that; Kickstarter and Indiegogo are fantastic for finding early adopters for new products (sometimes, the only buyers for new products). I write as someone who ponied up for a Pebble smartwatch on Kickstarter and waited a year for it to arrive. But that was OK. I had a watch in the meantime. People promising their money to Canonical will already have their smartphones too.

Shuttleworth continued: "We have also looked at other areas of the phone market which we think have fallen into the innovation gap. For example, we're going to have a pure sapphire touchscreen so it will be thinner, and yet resistant to the scratches you get with glass."

But, he added, "our goal is not to get into the phone business, but to create a fantastic test harness."

And so Shuttleworth apparently wants the Ubuntu Edge to recap the mistakes of past years. "We see the convergence of the phone and PC," he said. "And [we can] move the whole market forward faster than it would if left to its own devices."

Back to the future

Let's recap the past mistakes first, and then we'll look at why the idea of the "phone-PC hybrid" doesn't (and arguably can't) work.

There have been plenty of attempts to produce phone/PC hybrids. The Nokia N900? Palm Foleo? No, let's go back to the most recent - which, arguably, should be the one that had the best hope of succeeding.

Remember the Motorola Atrix? Sure you do - it was unveiled amid much fanfare at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, alongside the Motorola Xoom, the first tablet using Google's Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" software. (You remember the Xoom - the iPad killer. Sold a whopping million or so from its launch in March 2011 until it was quietly killed.)

The Atrix, though, was to be the next wave. It was, yes, a hybrid phone-PC, which ran Android and then, when connected to a screen via its micro-HDMI output plugged into a laptop accessory, would begin running Webtop - an Ubuntu-based desktop system and the Firefox browser. Engadget gave the Atrix 9 out of 10 and CNet gave it four out of five stars. It won a "Best Of CES" award.

Another thing: the Atrix was a terrible flop. Which may tell you as much as you need to know about reviews on some gadget websites. I had a test unit, and found it such a profoundly dispiriting experience that I gave up on it after a day. It was too limited and too frustrating ever to appeal to business users, who would be the only people who would be able to afford the accessories needed to plug the devices.

When I asked about this, Shuttleworth suggested that "the march of Moore's Law" means that fusty old hardware like the Atrix - which carried the moniker of the "world's most powerful smartphone" when it debuted - is outdated. "I think it was an 800MHz CPU" - actually it was a dual-core Tegra 2 running at 1GHz - "whereas ours will be running at 2.4 gigahertz." That's more specific than the project page, which says "We'll choose the fastest available multi-core processor, at least 4GB of RAM and a massive 128GB of storage." Well, the Atrix only offered 1GB and 16GB basic.

The thing about the Atrix was that there wasn't a market for it. As I suspected, people didn't want to carry a phone around to be their desktop. Cloud services weren't as good then of course - though it was the first 4G phone, there weren't the services to go with it.

So could the Ubuntu Edge be in the right place, right time? We have cloud services like Dropbox. It will have HDMI out, so you can connect it to a screen with an HDMI connector - no need for the Atrix's clumsy accessories.

Here's the odd thing with the Edge, though. It will be a dual boot device - Android as a phone, Ubuntu as a PC. Great! You sit down, and all those thoughts you saved on your Android phone aren't available to you when you're on Ubuntu. Or else the PC notes aren't there when you're on the phone. Update: the project says "you'll be able to move seamlessly from one environment to the other with no file syncing or transfers required".

( Also, forget about taking phone calls while you're on your "PC". Update: the project says "you'll be able to make calls from your desktop". So bring your headset with mic.) Yes, you can put the notes into the cloud via Evernote or Dropbox - but in that case, why mess about with 128GB of storage? Why, in fact, not just sit down in front of a personal computer of whatever hue (Windows, Mac, Linux distro, Chromebook) and connect to your cloud services? What problem does having a dual-boot phone actually solve?

The error of the hybrid

To my mind the category error that Shuttleworth and the Canonical team have fallen into here is to gaze upon the smartphone landscape, look upwards at the PC, and say "there's a gap there". There is. But it's already filled.

Let's assume for a minute that the project gets funded (which is likely, though not certain). So now you have your Ubuntu Edge in your pocket. You use it on the train, save some work to the cloud, and come into the office. Now… you need an HDMI cable and a screen to attach it to so that you can reboot into Ubuntu. What's that? Your work has already provided a PC (possibly running Ubuntu, though chances are probably not)? Well, that's your money spent buying a dual-boot phone wasted then.

But wait, there's another scenario! You're out and about and you need to write something up - a report, a sales meeting, a site visit. You turn up at the internet cafe, with an HDMI cable in your bag, and… wait, they have PCs there with screens. And no sign of an HDMI in - these are internet cafes, after all, and their screens date back to the Mesolithic age of computing.

Well, what about the situation where you turn up somewhere and they have screens you can plug your dual-boot phone in? Sure, those might exist. I'm sure you'll be able to think of a couple. That time when you visited that production facility and the desktop was broken but the screen worked. Sure. Update: sure enough, people have suggested a scenario: the business traveller who arrives at their hotel room and finds a monitor there. This means the Ubuntu Edge is perfect for the demographic of "business travellers who work for companies which are generous enough to pay for a nice hotel room but not for a work computer, and who don't want to lug around a laptop despite presumably having luggage, and want to do their work in Ubuntu." I'd suggest this is a very small demographic.

On the other hand, here's a solution which costs very much less than the Ubuntu Edge, allows you to keep your existing smartphone (if you've got $830 to burn on a crowdfunding project, you've surely already got a smartphone) and yet do useful work: buy a tablet.

Think of the advantages:
With a tablet, you can carry a screen around with you - no hunting for somewhere to plug it in;

You have a virtual keyboard all the time (and if you want to add a Bluetooth one, that's available too);

Whether it's an Android tablet or an iPad, those cloud services where you needed to store your notes from your smartphone are going to be available;

If your tablet doesn't have its own 3G or 4G connection, you can use the phone's hotspot to make a Wi-Fi link.

Certainly, carrying a tablet as well as a phone does mean toting more weight. But not much. Compared to the convenience it affords - larger-screen computing power absolutely anywhere you want it, including train station platforms (not many HDMI screens there), contrasted with the inconvenience of having to hunt around for a screen with an HDMI input, the tablet wins every time.

Of course, buying a tablet doesn't have the magic fairy dust of "open source" like the Ubuntu Edge might (though if you buy an Android tablet, near enough). But the trouble with hybrid devices is that you have to judge them perfectly; otherwise, like Microsoft with the Surface RT, you can be left holding the baby. (A $900m writeoff, in Microsoft's case.)

It's fairly certain that the project will hit its funding target - there are enough people in the world who think that running open source software confers a sort of magic on a device, and have the spare cash. But I suspect they won't use it as a phone/PC hybrid in the way Shuttleworth expects - and that it will end up being a pricey smartphone.

Still, a sapphire screen, eh? Sounds nice.

Corrected with points about file system access and call access on desktop; added scenario where you could use a screen.