<story><title>DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review</title><url>https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20160801#ubuntuphone</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rglullis</author><text>I got the BQ Aquarius 5 a few months ago, after my Moto G2 SIM card stopped working. So when comparing two budget-but-capable-phones, I can say that the hardware on the Ubuntu phone is not the problem.&lt;p&gt;The software they have is great, and I haven&amp;#x27;t seen any half-backed features. The updates are consistent and always bring something interesting. The idea of lenses and scopes are great as an alternative to the lack of common apps. I didn&amp;#x27;t miss not having a weather app or yelp, or youtube or whatever.&lt;p&gt;The one thing that is lacking on Ubuntu Touch are the things that are core to mobile use cases. For example:&lt;p&gt;- I understand that I won&amp;#x27;t get a decent Google Maps app, but there is no real alternative. Here Maps comes installed, but I could not find a way to get public transportation data. uNav seems to do the turn-by-turn navigation, but they don&amp;#x27;t have voice, which is useless when I am on a bike.&lt;p&gt;- There is no decent story for messaging&amp;#x2F;VoIP: You can have Telegram, but also is just a webview wrapper. Messenger, Whatsapp? Nothing. And if at least they had half-decent XMPP&amp;#x2F;SIP clients, I could try to drop the closed services and &lt;i&gt;try&lt;/i&gt; to switch my friends and family with me. But what good is a smartphone that I can&amp;#x27;t use to talk or chat?&lt;p&gt;Because of these things, I was basically forced to always be walking around with two phones: the Ubuntu one for connectivity and basic media and as a hotspot for my broken Android, which I would then use when I needed to look into maps or call&amp;#x2F;message someone. The hassle was enough for me to find a replacement board for the SIM card and go back to use only Android for everything. The Ubuntu phone now is in a drawer, waiting for me to get some time to play with application development for Ubuntu Touch.&lt;p&gt;All-in-all, my feeling is that Canonical is close to get its break and make Ubuntu a compelling alternative. It is just not there yet. I also hope that this Moto G was my last Android phone.</text></comment>
<story><title>DistroWatch Ubuntu Phone review</title><url>https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20160801#ubuntuphone</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kogepathic</author><text>&amp;gt; Over the past year and a half I have become accustomed to the idea that I get to run free applications on my phone in exchange for being shown semi-frequent ads. This tended not to bother me most of the time, except when Android apps would suddenly show me full screen videos at high volume.&lt;p&gt;Really? I installed AdAway [1] on my Android phone and since then I have seen no ads. Zero.&lt;p&gt;The only issue is that some legitimate apps don&amp;#x27;t work, because they pull content from sits which are blacklisted (mostly stock ticker apps). I feel that&amp;#x27;s a small price to pay for not having battery and data sucking ads during my phone experience.&lt;p&gt;Yes, it requires root to install the hosts file. That&amp;#x27;s basically a one time event (I rarely update the list and still never see ads) and the battery impact is none because the ad blocking works at DNS level (as opposed to say, a system-wide proxy)&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;f-droid.org&amp;#x2F;repository&amp;#x2F;browse&amp;#x2F;?fdfilter=Adaway&amp;amp;fdid=org.adaway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;f-droid.org&amp;#x2F;repository&amp;#x2F;browse&amp;#x2F;?fdfilter=Adaway&amp;amp;fdid=...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>