The development of the operating systems for smartphones has been on for a very long time. For those who started reading about smartphones a few years ago, there are many mobile systems that they never knew existed. The mobile phone system business has since become a two-horse race between Android and iOS. However, this was not always the case. Most recently, Huawei’s HarmonyOS is coming up with millions of smartphones right now. However, a long time ago, there were many other mobile systems like Ubuntu. Unfortunately, these systems all disappeared in the waves of history.
According to media reports, as the world’s first manufacturer of Ubuntu-based mobile phones, Spanish Bq (also known as Bq Readers) went bankrupt earlier this year. As of now, the official website of this system is no longer active.
Bq made Android phones and tablets in the early years. In 2015, it cooperated with Ubuntu system developer, Canonical, to release the first Ubuntu Phone system mobile phone, Aquarius E4.5. The price of this device was approximately RMB 1,200 ($185).
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This smartphone comes with a 4.5-inch display with a resolution of 960 × 540 display. Under the hood, it has a MediaTek MT6582 1.3GHz quad-core processor. This processor is supported with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. In the camera department, this device comes with a single 13MP rear camera and a 5MP front camera. It is interesting how 8GB of internal storage was enough just six years ago. Now, we are looking at 100 times of this storage capacity on flagship smartphones.
Meizu and many other manufacturers used Ubuntu
At that time, Twitter, eBay, Amazon, Yelp, Spotify, Dropbox, and other applications all released the Ubuntu mobile version. In addition, Meizu also unveiled the Meizu MX4 and PRO 5 which use the Ubuntu system.
In 2017, Canonical officially cut off the Ubuntu Phone mobile version system. As of 2019, Bq was supported by the Vietnamese hardware company, Vingroup, but its brand was gradually replaced by the latter’s Vsmart, and now they are all withered.
Meizu MX4 specifications
- 5.36-inch (1920 x 1152 pixels) IPS display with 418 PPI
- Octa-Core (2.2 GHz ARM Cortex A17 x4+ 1.7GHz ARM Cortex A7 x4) MediaTek MT6595 processor with PowerVR G6200 GPU
- 2GB DDR3 RAM, 16/32/64GB internal memory variants
- Ubuntu Touch OS
- 8.9 mm thick and weighs 147g
- 20.7 MP rear camera with dual tone LED Flash, Sony IMX 220 Exmor RS BSI sensor, f/2.2 aperture, 4K video recording, 720p slow motion
- 2.1MP front-facing camera, f/2.0 aperture
- NXP Smart PA second-generation audio chip
- 4G LTE (TD-LTE / LTE-FDD), 3G HSPA+ , WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4/5 GHz), Bluetooth 4.0, GPS / GLONASS
- 3100mAh removable battery
