"The world's first Ubuntu smartphone," the Aquaris E4.5, will go on sale on Feb. 9, Monday. The device from Canonical will be available across Europe through a series of Flash sales from BQ.com for 169.90 euro.
Aside from the Spanish electronics retailer, the Aquaris E4.5 will also be available from another Spanish seller amena.com as well as from 3 Sweden, giffgaff in the United Kingdom and Portugal Telecom. These operators will be offering the device in SIM bundles.
Christian Parrino, Canonical's VP of mobile, acknowledges it is hard for the company to enter a mobile market where Apple's iOS and Google's Android dominate. So the company decided to focus selling the Aquaris E4.5 on a smaller group of early adopters instead.
But the launch of the first Ubuntu smartphone is a "significant milestone," according to Jane Silber, CEO at Canonical. Silber added that the Aquaris E4.5 offers users a new experience and provides manufacturers and operators new opportunities, which she believes is "a compelling and much-needed change" from what the market currently offers.
Aquaris E4.5, which runs on Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu 15.04, is the company's first foray into the path that it believes will lead to a unified desktop and mobile OS. "There will come a time when the desktop application and the phone application are the same set of code," Parrino stated in a press release.
The Aquaris E4.5 has a slim design with a 4.5-inch screen. It features a quad-core MediaTek processor clocked at 1.3 GHz with 1 GB RAM under the hood. It comes with a 5-MP front shooter and an 8-MP rear camera equipped with autofocus, dual flash, BSI sensors, Largan lens and full HD (1,080p).
The number one selling point of Aquaris E4.5 is Scopes, which are full screen menus that show content stored on both the users' phone and on services they use, explains ZDNet. A music Scope, for example, would let users see music content from their phone, SoundCloud, GrooveShark and YouTube.