The Phone roadmap from Ubuntu Online Summit

May 6, 2015 21:10 GMT  ·  By

We reported the other day that the Ubuntu Touch developers had a great session during the Ubuntu Online Summit for the next major release of the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).

The session entitled Phone Roadmap was one of the most popular and constructive for Ubuntu Touch developers. They reviewed the product roadmap for the phone, primarily the feature set that's coming up in the next three months or so.

In the first part of the video, the devs talked about the soon-to-be-released OTA-3.5 bugfix update for Ubuntu Touch, which should see the light of day by the end of this week, and about the upcoming features implemented in the OTA 4 update that will be released by the end of May and will be based on Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet).

Great new features are coming to Ubuntu for phones

There are lots of new good stuff coming for Ubuntu for phones, especially for BQ Aquaris E4.5 users, prior to the entire transition to snaps, which will come later this year. First of all, multimedia support will be greatly enhanced, with playlist visibility in the indicator, playback controls in the sound indicator, and support for .M3U files.

Second of all, there will finally be support for playing videos under the lock screen (background playback), hotspot support, USB Tethering support, better Bluetooth support, proper 3G data setup, NFC support, a Private browsing mode, bookmark folders, copy and paste across fields, support for adding Web Apps to the Home screen, better app startup performance, and new keyboard layouts for different languages.

Among other features that will come to an Ubuntu phone near you this summer, we can mention spatial recognition, improved input method support, Asian language improvements, filters and effects to the camera app, Qt 5.5 support, shell rotation support, Scope customization, Scope filters, WPA Enterprise support, in-app purchases support, better scrolling performance, as well as a revamped thumbnailer.