The Ubuntu Touch OS is expanding in a new market

Nov 17, 2015 09:56 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu Touch OS has officially landed in Russia with the launch of the BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Edition, further increasing the reach of this operating system.

Ubuntu Touch is an operating system developed by Canonical for mobile devices like phones and tablets. It's available on a number of phones, including a couple from the Spanish company BQ. Until now, the Ubuntu phones have covered a large part of the world, with special releases for China, Europe, United States (partially), India, and now Russia.

The interesting thing is that the OS is provided for free, and no one is stopping users from anywhere in the world to install it, although finding the Nexus 4 reference device is becoming increasingly difficult. A dedicated launch means that the OS is populated with specific content for that region, like dedicated scopes and better support for the Cyrillic alphabet.

BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Edition arrives in Russia

The BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Edition is just one of the two devices sold by BQ and powered by Ubuntu. The second one is a slightly smaller version, with pretty much the same hardware. It's called BQ Aquaris e4.5, and it will be released very soon as well.

"After previous successful launches of the Aquaris E4.5 and E5 HD Ubuntu Editions, BQ will now release Ubuntu Phones in Russia. Devices will be available for purchase through a host of local distributors such as Ozon.ru. The Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition will be sold at a price of 15,499 ‎₽ ($236) with the soon to be launched Aquaris E4.5 at a price of 12,499 ‎₽ ($190)," reads the official announcement.

BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Edition, the new phone from BQ, is different from their current offering, and it features more powerful hardware. Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition comes with a 5-inch IPS HD display with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels (380 cd/m2), a MediaTek quad-core Cortex A7 CPU at 1.3 GHz, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage.