Aroint thee, phone!

I'm due a phone upgrade on June 28th, and it cannot come soon enough.

For the last three years, four months and thirteen days, I've been using webOS phones. Starting with the Palm Pre when it came out, I've gone through the Pre² and now use the Pre³. I love webOS, and nothing else I've used has convinced me that it's anything other than the best-designed and easiest-to-use mobile phone operating system that's out there. Sadly, nobody else seems to have agreed with me (least of all HP, who until three days owned webOS, until they sold it to LG), and since neither Palm nor HP had the money to really push the boat out on proper hardware it's actually pretty easy to see why.

webOS has always been a bit sluggish, its usability hampered by slow responses to user input. Occasionally the phone's multitasking will cause the entire device to freeze for a few seconds, leaving me incapable of even closing the offending app. My phone occasionally won't switch on the mic when I make or answer a phone call, leaving me muted. The browser runs out of memory with more than one card open, which effectively cripples the whole point of a multitasking OS, and will randomly reload an entire page or fail to render more than one screen's height.

I find it really difficult to use anything else, though. The best thing about the Pre series of hardware, which I desperately wish other companies would steal, is the the gesture bar - a touch-sensitive panel that runs off the bottom of the screen. I'm so used to the Pre gestures that I do them automatically on any other phone I pick up.

Come June, I'm probably going to pick up a Windows Phone 8 device¹. It's probably the operating system that I've used least of the three big names currently on the market, but I really like that it's trying to distinguish itself from Android and iOS' boring icon grids. I'll probably take a few weeks to stop trying the back gesture, though.

¹ What can I say? I'm committed to the underdog.

Ubuntu mobile

Canonical, the group that maintains the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, have announced a touch-centred phone UI for Ubuntu. The plan, apparently, is that the phone will be able to connect to a keyboard, mouse and external monitor - which should, in theory, convert it into a full desktop PC.

There are a couple of hurdles in the way, though. Firstly, the early videos and previews I've seen have been less than glowing. They all realise it's a pre-alpha, first-release version of the OS, but the lag and reliance on gestures have caused concern. The gestures in particular don't seem quite right to me; they might be more useful once the lag's worked out, but I get the impression that the swipe-down gestures in particular were thought up for use by a mouse - the target icons are minute, which has the potential to make finger navigation a right pain.

The second, in my opinion much more dangerous, problem they face is the timeline. Ubuntu Phone devices aren't going to be available until early 2014 - over a year away. That's assuming, of course, that there aren't any unexpected delays or manufacturing problems - which would be unheard of outside Apple's processes.

A long lead in, giving developers time to get used to and create software for the OS, isn't necessarily a death knell for Ubuntu on phones, but they've basically given everyone else in the smartphone market a list of features that they can start copying now to undermine all of Ubuntu Phone's USPs by the time it launches.

Palm, and later HP, made similar premature announcements about webOS that meant once the devices hit the market their features were either old news or had been effectively incorporated into Android, iOS or both.

Obviously the phone-as-full-PC feature is going to be difficult for Apple or Google to rip off, without a big-screen version of iOS or Android currently on the cards, but I'd expect the majority of smartphone users aren't looking for that as a primary use for their next device. The gesture stuff, which is in a stronger position to change how people use their phone day to day, is much easier for someone else to nab in the next twelve months.