They should be able to hit the sub-$200 price point with one of their hardware partners, but that is hardly a differentiator these days now that the Moto G and the Lumia 520 are already there for Android and Windows Phone.
I'm personally mildly excited for the idea of a "real" Linux phone, if it carries out the concept of being a phone that can be used in desktop/laptop docks (which various people have attempted without success on Android phones) to serve as your one very portable computer. Also it needs to have a competent nav/driving app. Basically the sole thing that keeps me on Android these days is Google Maps, and Google has even been testing me with that since the dreadful redesign they did with 7.x.x.
Don't the planned Ubuntu Touch phones (and the current Dev builds) run a modified Cyanogen kernel and a bionic-linked userland? (i.e. Android in Ubuntu-brown)?
As far as I'm concerned, the next Linux phone is the Jolla.
I believe the current builds run a (standard?) kernel, with a partial Android userland in an LXC container. I assume the point of this is to access some services that are implemented in Android.
They were indeed running Android with Ubuntu in the container, until the container flip a few months ago.
> I believe the current builds run a (standard?) kernel, with a partial Android userland in an LXC container. I assume the point of this is to access some services that are implemented in Android.
Most mobile devices use an Android kernel since there's far more support for ARM SoCs, etc. with the Android kernel. Plus you can't really run an Android userland without running an Android kernel somewhere; they're intimately tied (see Binder).
I'm personally mildly excited for the idea of a "real" Linux phone, if it carries out the concept of being a phone that can be used in desktop/laptop docks (which various people have attempted without success on Android phones) to serve as your one very portable computer. Also it needs to have a competent nav/driving app. Basically the sole thing that keeps me on Android these days is Google Maps, and Google has even been testing me with that since the dreadful redesign they did with 7.x.x.