The votes have been counted and most of you want Ubuntu on your smartphones, according to our unscientific poll. This doesn’t come as a surprise, since an earlier poll showed a preference for Ubuntu on tablets as well. Not bad for an OS that’s not really available yet on those hardware platforms.
Back on May 7th, when we ran an article reporting the results of our poll on tablet operating systems, we decided to carry that poll a step further and served-up a poll to see what operating system you’d most like to have on your smartphone. We asked the exact same question on the new poll as we did on the old, just swapping the term “smartphone” for “tablet.”
“What operating system would you be most likely to consider for a smartphone if available?”
The choices offered on the poll were Symbian, Ubuntu, Android, Windows, Firefox OS, iOS, MeeGo, Mer, Blackberry 10 and Other. Voters were allowed to choose only one operating system and those choosing Other were provided a text box to enter their choice. Voters were blocked from taking the poll multiple times by IP address. A total of 238 people took this poll.
The Sailfish OS, which is based on MeeGo and Mer, was not included as an option, other than write-in. In retrospect this is unfortunate, given last week’s announcement that ex-Nokia employees plan to market a phone later this year running Sailfish.
Since comparisons between this poll and the previous tablet poll are inevitable, we should point out there were a few differences in the choices available. Firefox OS, MeeGo, Mer and Symbian were offered in the phone poll only, while WebOS was offered only in our tablet poll. Those taking the tablet poll were also offered the option to two versions of Windows, Windows Phone 8 and RT, while the tablet poll only included a single “Windows” entry.
And the winner is…
| [yop_poll id=”11″] |
As with the tablet poll, Ubuntu was the clear winner here, garnering 140 votes or 59% of those cast – which was down from 66% in the previous poll. In second place was Android with 34 votes, 14% of the total, which was consistent with the previous poll. Firefox OS took third place, with 20 votes or 8% of the total.
After that, it wasn’t even close. The number four operating system, MeeGo, pulled only 8 votes or 3% of the total.
It’s worth noting, however, that MeeGo and Mer together garnered 13 votes for roughly 5% of the total. If we add 5 additional votes that were written-in for Jolla, Sailfish and “KDE on Mer” under Other, then Meego/Mer have a total of 18 votes or around 8%, nearly the same as Firefox. However, Firefox OS received an additional write-in vote under Other, bringing it’s total to 21.
16 voters, or 7%, chose the “Other” option and wrote-in one each for Vivaldi, Plasma Active, Fedora, Firefox OS, Debian, GNOME 3, KDE on Mer and PCLinuxOS. Arch Linux, Tizen, Jolla and Sailfish were written-in two times each.
We think it noteworthy that iOS, supposedly the crown jewel of phone operating systems, fared poorly in our poll, getting only 5 votes for 2% of the total. Only two operating systems among the listed choices polled lower than Apple, those being Windows and Symbian.
About the winner…
According to Canonical, the Ubuntu operating system is pretty much phone ready now. They now have a special page on their website devoted to Ubuntu for the phone, with information and tools for mobile app developers. The page also contains information for manufacturers, so we assume Canonical is in discussions with OEMs now.
This poll was created on May 7, 2013 and polling was ended on May 13, 2013 a few minutes after noon, eastern time.
na, don’t want this on my phone. happy with android. with over 200 million suposidly ubuntu users 140 votes seem low don’t you think?
Put this poll all over the World and you’ll get your results.