Canonical reinforces Carrier Advisory Group

Canonical has announced that China Unicom has joined the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG). The CAG, launched in June, allows carriers to shape the development and deployment of Canonical's Ubuntu for phones, which is currently in development. It also gives carriers the chance to be exclusive launch partners in their territory when Ubuntu for phones becomes available.

China Unicom is a state-owned provider that serves mainland China and has around 162 million 2G subscribers and over 87 million 3G subscribers, with the latter expanding by around 11 million in the first quarter of the year. The addition of China Unicom to the CAG means that most of the major growth markets appear to be covered by the membership; another recent addition to the group is smartfren, an Indonesian carrier. Canonical is still looking for further CAG members.

Meanwhile development of Ubuntu for phones is progressing. For example, the developers have recently flipped the way they build it so it is hosted on Ubuntu, rather than as a chrooted OS on Android. They are also working, according to a blog post from Community Manager Jono Bacon, on getting the core apps ready for "dogfooding" by the end of July. A page has been created to track the progress of getting "Calendar, Music Player, Clock, Calculator, Weather App, Sudoku, RSS Reader, File Manager, Document Viewer, Terminal, Dropping Letters game, and a Stock Ticker" ready for Ubuntu for phones testers to place on their own phones. "We don’t expect the first iteration of the phone to be ready until October" says Bacon and while "many of these applications are pretty much already there" for dogfooding, "some others need more work."

(djwm)