In many office environments today it is common for mid and upper level employees to have their own corporate laptop that they carry with them everywhere they go and attach it to a dock station either at their desk at work or at home, which allows quick connection of the laptop to a traditional keyboard, mouse and monitor. With the advances in CPU technology as of late and predictions of many new smart phones this year being equiped with quad-core processors, it has gotten some who use such laptops in office environments wondering if they still need to carry big old clunky laptops around just for the sake of processing power. Well if you are such a person you’ll be in for a treat this year as the smart phone as we know it today is about to make many laptops obsolete.
Canonical has just announced their intentions of releasing Ubuntu for mobile smart phones this year, targeting business as well as consumer markets and allowing many current Android phone users the ability to install Ubuntu on their phone as an alternative in the coming months for free. Quad-core processing power in smart phones seen this year will approach the kind of processing speed you normally see on entry to moderate level PCs today (think Intel i3), which is more than necessary for a lot that people do on their desktop or on their phone for that matter. The mobile version of the Ubuntu OS will be available for many Android users for free in the coming months and for those with the latest and greatest phones to hit market they’ll be able to use the phone as a complete desktop replacement via a dock much in the same way many laptops currently do. It’s very exciting news! I’m not going to ramble on here about how or why this is going to happen as head of Canonical Mark Shuttleworth has already done so in this proposal video where he speaks about the immediate goals for Ubuntu.