Ubuntu Phone finally goes global

The people of Europe and China have been able to enjoy the Ubuntu Phone experience for a good few months. And now, thanks to Spanish smartphone maker BQ, the rest of the world can too.

The company has announced that it has begun shipping its Aquarius E5 Ubuntu smartphone across the globe.

With a price tag of €199.90, it should hardly be surprising that the phone comes with fairly basic specs including a 5-inch 720 x 1280 display, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of memory (although you can bump that up with a Micro SD card), and a 1.7GHz, quad-core Mediatek chip.

As The Verge notes however, the real appeal of an Ubuntu phone isn’t as much in the device as it is the OS running on it.

Read more: Ubuntu Phone is finally here thanks to BQ Aquaris ‘Ubuntu Edition’

And what makes Ubuntu Phone different from its more established cousins is that it doesn’t rely on an app to consumer model.

Instead, it makes use of “scopes” which bring related content into a homescreen. What that means is that instead of building a standalone app, developers can plug their services into a relevant scope.

It’s a neat idea, and is clearly an attempt at hitting the mobile establishment at right angles. Trouble is, it’s taken it a long while to even get this far. And while it tries to claw back some ground on Android’s massive lead, it’s also facing competition from the likes of Mozilla, which is betting on emerging markets for its Firefox OS.