14 DAY TRIAL // We've been asked by many of our readers what's going on with the development of the next major OTA software update for Canonical's Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices, the OTA-13.
Well, we've been monitoring the development of Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 quite closely in the past month, and we can tell you that almost all components, including default apps and Scopes, have received improvements. As expected, there will also be optimizations to the Unity 8 interface, which is now powered by the Mir 0.24 display server.
Right now, Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 is in Final Freeze. This means that no new features will be added to the final release, which should happen around the 14th of September. The first official RC (Release Candidate) images might land later today for those brave enough to use the rc-proposed channel on their Ubuntu Phone/Tablet devices.
As mentioned in one of our previous articles, the biggest attractions of the OTA-13 update will be support for Android 6.0 BSP (Board Support Packages), which opens the gate to new Ubuntu Phones and Tablets, and repowerd, a new power manager that promises major battery life improvements. There should also be copy-paste support.
The Calculator app got many improvements
Thanks to a news tip from one of our regular readers, it appears that the Calculator app has received a major update, version 2.0.304, and includes a new welcome wizard to learn how to use the app. Moreover, it starts a lot faster, and it lets you select all previous calculations and delete them all with a few clicks instead of having to do it individually.
The Libertine Scope introduced in the Ubuntu Touch OTA-12 update, where you can see all of your X11 apps, will be renamed to "Desktop Apps," so don't be surprised after installing OTA-13. Again, almost all apps and components were updated in Ubuntu Touch OTA-13, which remains based on Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) for now. More details soon!
Update: At the time of writing the article, the official release date for Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 was set for September 14, 2016, according to Lukasz Zemczak from Canonical. It looks like the OTA-13 has been delayed due to reasons that are not known us, and it might land sometime next week, but no official date has been set in stone for now!