Canonical is NOT developing an Ubuntu Tablet Edition, says Shuttleworth

Written on June 21st, 2010 at 21:07 pm by shredder12

The man behind Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, has scratched all the circulating rumours about Canonical working on an Ubuntu Tablet version. He said that Ubuntu is all about Servers, Desktops and Netbooks; there are no plans for bringing Ubuntu to a smartphone or Tablet as of now.

The rumours were based on an interview with, Chris Kenyon, Canonical's Vice-President of OEM, where he showed company's interest in entering the mobile devices market.

"The devices world is a really exciting space right now and we're really bullish on it",  said Kenyon

But later in an interview with Golem.de, Mark Shuttleworth, clearly stated that Ubuntu remains for Servers, Desktops and nebooks. There are no plans to bring Ubuntu on Tablets. He also said that the work on a light version of Ubuntu is for optimizing the OS for the upcoming netbook edition based on Ubuntu 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat.

Although it sounds nice to see Ubuntu on a Tablet, but its a good decision by Canonical to concentrate on the netbook edition instead of jumping in the Tablet world. There are already big competitors with better options - Meego, iOS, Android, all of them are lead by companies who have years of experience in Mobile devices. I think its better to take slow steps and conqueur the Netbook space first but ofcourse no one is stopping anyone to come up with a TabletOS based on Ubuntu, who knows.

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