14 DAY TRIAL // We reported yesterday, May 28 that the major OTA-4 update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system from Canonical will finally arrive sometime in the middle of next week.
Today, May 29, we are happy to inform you that the entire list of Ubuntu Phone updates has been published by Canonical on their Ubuntu Insights website earlier. "We've got the latest OTA updates from May to share with you for the Ubuntu Phone," says Canonical in a Google+ post.
According to the attached release notes, Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 makes all the Indicators icons monochromatic, the Address Book has a new settings panel, supports import of SIM contacts, and improves the first time user experience when importing and synchronizing contacts.
The web browser received a lot of awesome features, among which we can mention a new settings user interface with Privacy options, better visualization and interaction of top websites, quick access to the tabs view via a new bottom edge gesture, private browsing, search suggestions in the address bar, and tab previews improvements.
Moreover, the web browser gets improved chrome interaction and scrolling smoothness, support for saving and restoring the navigation state between sessions, a new bottom edge gesture that allows you to exit full-screen windows quickly, and a couple of internal fixes that promise for a better, enhanced web browsing experience.
There are more changes in Scopes, Toolkit, Qt 5.4, and Messaging app
In addition to the changes mentioned above, the Ubuntu Touch OTA-4 update will add group chat support to the Messaging app, though it would appear that this feature will arrive after the OTA update, as well as various Scopes improvements, such as Scope tagging, keywords support in the Today, News, and Nearby Scopes, and an all-new, improved layout for the News Scope.
The Ubuntu Touch Toolkit has been updated to version 1.3 and it has been migrated to Qt 5.4 with a refactored OrientationHelper and UbuntuShape functions, optimized ProgressBar and Slider components, better alarm services, brand-new dedicated overlay shape, revamped ListItem, implementation of PageStack header animations in MainView 1.2, robust and simplified animation code, and enhanced performance in text areas.
Lastly, because the Toolkit has been migrated to Qt 5.4, Ubuntu Touch developers will have access to all of its new and powerful features, such as Qt WebSockets, support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and 3.1, two new QML modules (QML Models and Declarative State Machine), better font rendering for numerous languages, QQuickRenderControl, QStorageInfo, and much more.