I have the Meizu Mx4 and have used it with Ubuntu touch for something like 8 months. There are some misconceptions here in this thread that no one bothered to correct. The first one is that any Ubuntu repo program will run on Ubuntu Touch. This is not the case, you cannot install a single program from the normal Ubuntu repo, altough there are some exceptions (hackery) that in certain situations might allow this. Up to this date, Ubuntu has not been released on any device that is x86, which is part of the problem, since Ubuntu does not maintain large repos in other architectures. IIRC there is going to be a x86 Ubuntu tablet released soo however. But there are other problems related to installing stuff from apt-get or wgetting packages from the net. (see http://askubuntu.com/questions/60006...n-ubuntu-touch) Furthermore, some one also said in this thread that OTA updtes come daily, they don't they come at 6 week intervals.

But can the phone be used or is it buggy and akward? I would say that now most of the normal phoney stuff works normally. With this I mean that there is no functional noticeable differnece compared to Android when using things like making phone calls or sending SMS. THere are alot working "core" apps developed by Ubuntu, the web browser, email client, music app, camera, terminal, file manager, gps navigation, and very many other applications developed by others than Ubuntu. Thes apps about do what you would expect them to do but some are quite basic in terms of functionality. The most obvious difference when comparing to Android is that there is no working voip app. There is a Skype web app, but even though it is Skype's official web page essentially, it only allows you to send messages (no video, no sound). There is a google hangouts app but it has the same problems. These apps also cannot give notifications. So the best messaging app is Telegram, but even that has limitations, like no voice over ip, no video (so more or less the same as the webapps of microsoft and google, except notifications work.

It rarely crashes, but there are some bugs that are somehwat annoying. For example, the Meizu phone was marketed as 4k video capable, but the video program cannot capture 4k still (months after release). You can follow these bugs on launchpad.

However, there are chances that these limitations will be overcome in the future.

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Thank you for the update.

While I'm aware that "dev-mode" adds write permissions for the base/core system, does this allow you to use a third party VOIP app (assuming the core stuff still isn't supporting any of it)?
I've had a few of them "working" on the BQ, but the hardware was a bit to slow. Are those usable on the Meizo?

I haven't tried this. In theory you can then find an ARM .deb and install that. However, after one particulat OTA (can't remember which one) the OS was changed (for security reasons) to only allow the use of the microphone and video recorder if the program uses a specific manner to request permission and the user allows it. Since most of such random ARM .debs will not have been written and compiled with Ubuntu Touch in mind, they will not know how to do this. So, I'm guessing that if you were to install, let's say Viber, like this (since I believe they release such packages) it would not be able to accees the mic and video.

I forgot to mention that there is also a webWhatsapp, which is essentially the webpage. That allows you to use whatssapp in any computer that has a browser. However, it requires you to have another instance of Whatsapp running on another Android phone. So, if you had an old Androind phone, you could - in theory - turn that on with your account and access it with wifi at home 24/7. Then you could use the app on your Ubuntu phone. But again you would not have calls or video, and were the phone with android to ever go offline, you would loose connection on the Ubuntu phone immediately. But at least you could share photos and other stuff with people that have whatsapp.

at this point, if some one is still thinking about getting a Ubuntu phone, you should note that Ubuntu touch has essentially been discontinued. The OS will probably be resurfaced as "Ubuntu Personal" some time in the future. The main diffence will be that it will be based on snap packages and not click any more. According to the discussion on the mailing list, this will also mean that most current Ubuntu phones and devices will not be supported. So, if anyone has any interest in this any more, you probably should take that into consideration before you invest in hardware.


I think that at the end of the day the OS was quite lacking and buggy (there was approximately 1000 mostly unworkder on bugs in the core apps alone) in many ways, but it was nevertheless a nice experiment and the future iterations will probably be better (if they come).

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I think the community team at UBports has touched the issue on whether Ubuntu Touch is dead or not:
https://blog.ubports.com/2017/01/06/...ouch-dead.html

In a nutshell, there is important work that needs to be done in order to move Ubuntu to using snaps
so the resources have shifted there in order to complete the task.
The switch from click packages to snaps (technically they have similarities) is not hardware-dependent.
At the moment, those that get the Fairphone 2, will be able to install Ubuntu Touch from the community port of UBports.