The BQ Aquaris ubuntu phone that I waited for so eagerly was delivered today. Full of anticipation I unpacked it and switched it on. After playing with it for a while the excitement turned into dissatisfaction. I hate to say it, but on a phone the solid base and polished user experience is not enough, some basic functionality is required as well. Rough edges are much harder to work around on a phone than on a computer with a regular keyboard. Let’s face it, most people who opt for ubuntu phone want to some degree escape the freedom hating ecosystems prevalent on the big platforms. Yet instead of welcoming users with freedom loving functionality, the phone is loaded with Google, Facebook and Twitter apps.
As long as you don’t expect anything from it, it’s a pleasant experience. Knowing that it’s based on debian packages gives me great comfort. The touch interface and the settings dialogs are very nice. Yet it is lacking basic PIM and email functionality.
Phone
Nowadays one could consider the phone functionality not the most important part of a smartphone anymore. I first had to have my SIM card cut to the smaller form factor. Text messages seem to work nicely. Phone calls work fine. MMS messages were automatically configured to look up on a website by the carrier. I don’t know if the phone would support them propperly, but that’s a feature that I rarely use anyway.
Contacts
When opening the contacts app, I was greeted with the question if I wanted to sync with Google. Hell no! If I did, I would have stayed with Android. But that seems to be the only option other than having a standalone address book and typing in everything by hand. I could not find an option to sync my CardDAV address book. Lots of people complained badly about this, so it got medium priority. There is a complicated workaround using evolution sync. That way I got my address book synced from the commandline. An entry in crontab keeps it synced.
Calendar
Basically the same as contacts, except that the calendar app was not pre-installed and had to be fetched from the app store. I configured syncevolution from the commandline the same way as the address book, including crontab. But the calendar does not properly synchronize. It pushes appointments I create on the phone. But it doesn’t fetch them from the server. I will have to do some more debugging here.
There doesn’t seem to be a standard email client. Instead it ships with a GMail app. People complained that there was no IMAP support whatsoever. At least I could find an email client in the app store called Dekko. The bad thing however is that instead of connecting to the email server it just hangs for an hour. When I try it without encryption, it appears to work. I can send mails, but it won’t fetch them. Another IMAP account works well, just not the one that is most important for me. Mails from my main account were fetched exactly once. Before and after that, all I get is the following error message: “Too many invalid IMAP commands”
Update: It took some manual editing of the config file to get it finally working. Now I’m looking forward to support for notificatoin about new mails, but that is less important in comparison.
Bluetooth
Connecting to the Jabra headphones was simple as always, and the sound quality is good. But I didn’t manage to connect any of the four bluetooth keyboards I tried. Also the yubikey does not work as an external keyboard, so at first I thought it might be a general HID problem. But when I connect a USB keyboard, that works.
BitCoin
The BitCoin client from the app store is not usable for real life. It doesn’t work with qr codes, and has no key backup functionality. I can work around the missing key backup, by manually copying the file “/home/phablet/.local/share/org.sambull.bitcoin-app/ubc.wallet” to a safe place, but qr code reading is really a must. Even if there was a qr reader app, pasting in the bitcoin app is missing. I might have to resort to a web wallet for some time.
There is a webapp for coinbase already in the store, so I tried this one first. I can scan the qr code from out of the browser by automatically launching the camera app. The picture is then uploaded to the server for the qr code reading. This seems to be common practice, but of course it is way inferior to having an app where you can move your camera until it successfully reads the qr code. But after I enter the amount and click “next”, I get a white screen, and the web app won’t respond any more. A coinbase support representative told me he had the same with safari mobile, and using the back button helped. There is no back button in the webapp, so I tried it in the browser. “Back” landed me on another white page, and “forward” led to an error message.
The next web wallet I tried was xapo. Since I use their debit card, it would be convenient. But their send page has no qr functionality.
So I moved on to greenaddress. I almost succeeded. If it wasn’t due to the defunct email. They sent me a 2FA code to my main email address, which unfortunately doesn’t work on the phone yet.
XBMC remote control
I was releaved to find more than one XBMC remote in the app store, and some are even better than what I had on Android.
News
The rss reader and the news scope make for a pleasant appearance. They find my preferred rss feeds without needing the exact URL For podcasts, I had to install PodBird. It works fine for audio podcasts. It also downloads video files, but won’t play them.
Apps
I seem to remember that they planned to be able to run android apps on ubuntu phone. But it appears those plans were abandoned a long time ago. Hence naturally for a new platform the selection of available apps is very sparse. Seems I will have to live without some apps I used frequently on Android such as SBB, 20min, MeteoSwiss… All this information and functionality is also available on the respective websites. The apps are just more convenient.
APT
Part of the reason why I wanted a ubuntu phone is the underlying debian package system. I maintained an ubuntu chroot system image on my android phone so that I could perform some tasks on a full blown shell. But it always was quirky at some points and a second class citizen all along. So I wanted the ubuntu shell to be a first class citizen. Indeed you can start a terminal which behaves very well. The keyboard is missing tab and arrow keys though. You have access to apt, or so it seems at first. when you actually want to install something you see error messages about some lock files. To get around that, one needs to enable developer mode in the phone settings and remount the root file system as readwrite. But then came something disturbing:
$sudo mount -o remount,rw / $sudo apt-get update $sudo apt-get install git tig nmap htop pcsc-tools gpgsm gnupg-agent Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut. Statusinformationen werden eingelesen.... Fertig Package git is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'git' has no installation candidate E: Paket tig kann nicht gefunden werden. E: Paket nmap kann nicht gefunden werden. E: Paket htop kann nicht gefunden werden. E: Paket pcsc-tools kann nicht gefunden werden.
WTF is going on here! A repository that is missing crucial packages? Mixing repositories with ubuntu propper is probably not a great idea. I don’t know yet what to do about that.
People on IRC confirmed that rather than changing the root filesystem, it’s better to have a chroot of ubuntu proper for the additional tools. This is what I had on android and hoped it would no longer be necessary on ubuntu phone.
GPG
gpg and gpg-agent were already installed. Udev is running as well. So after adding an udev rule and configuring the gpg-agent, I was able to use my YubiKey neo in OpenPGP mode for ssh authentication and similar tasks. This is great news, as it was one of the soar points with my old phone.
GPS
The phone comes with a mapping app pre installed. It looks decent, if finds the addresses, displays maps and calculates routes, everything online as it appears. What it does not however, is displaying the current position, which is crucial if you want to use it for navigation. On the internet I found people claiming that the GPS on the Aquarius doesn’t work at all, or very badly. There is some commandline program for analyzing GPS reception, which I plan to try.
Update: The utility confirmed that the GPS is not able to get a fix, not even on a mountain with clear sky.
SPOT Connect
The SPOT Connect is a satellite messenger that I use for cross country paragliding. In contrast to other live tracking systems it also works in areas without GSM reception, as it transmits the current location directly to the GlobalStar satellite network. They have an app to control it for Android and iOS, but not yet for ubuntu. I told them two years ago that it would be nice to be able to start tracking on the device itself without having to do it in the app. Now that I just lost that app support, I asked them again what options I have. But as with lots of big companies, I have the impression the support staff has a database with answers and no means to escalate feature requests or even bug reports from customers. Then I remembered a site that I found two years ago when I got the device, where a guy reverse engineered parts of the comms protocol. And sure enough I got the python utility running inside my chroot environment on the phone. That allows me to send custom ok messages, but I have yet to find out how to start tracking.
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