It's kind of a shame the Ubuntu phone never really materialized. At one point a while back I put off a much needed upgrade from a nearly dead phone for about 6 months because their phone was supposed to be "any day now".

I think the OS is still kicking around and technically not dead yet, but it's really hard to believe that it would be able to break into the OEM side of things at this point. If Microsoft couldn't buy their way in to it I don't see much hope for a group that wouldn't be paying massive amounts of money to handset manufacturers and carriers to support the development & deployment. Though I'd be happy if it were simply possible to flash it onto most Android handsets with full hardware compatibility.