Honestly? No. I can't imagine the agony of trying to type out a SQL query on my phone. I have a Macbook Air, which is light enough for me to carry around with me the vast majority of the time- it's great.
If I wanted something smaller I would perhaps get a tablet with a keyboard (or a netbook, if they weren't all terrible)... but doing any meaningful work on my phone? No thanks. I can barely bring myself to type out a reasonably-sized e-mail on mine.
However, the rest of the phone sucks, so I can't recommend it.
I use my phone right now for sshing into my home machines and getting analytics, benchmarks, error logs, making spot changes to files, editing users and groups, etc. If you have a smartphone with a foldout keyboard, you're set. The possibility of me being able to do this with urxvt and emacs running on the phone is just awesome. Interacting with postgres on the cli with my phone is a dream as well. Obviously writing out huge statements is a pain, but you're generally just running one liners through to find some info.
unless you meant an actual bluetooth keyboard, then its just a matter of foldable vs fixed and what you like more. My dad uses this:
http://www.quill.com/android-keyboards/cbs/283296.html?cm_mm...
for his nexus 7. Works out pretty well.
I used to perform most of these tasks on Nokia phone (yes, right!) - N900. Too bad, it didn't pick up on the market.
Wrong pick on the OS name, I guess :P.
Almost the entirety of Linux userland software is very portable because the server space needs it to run on x86/sparc/power/itanic/whatever. There are exceptions but they tend to be rare and temporary, because hardware vendors don't want customers switching to x86 just because foo app doesn't run on their architecture, and for open source apps the hardware vendors can fix it themselves.
Meanwhile Linux is about the only sensible thing you can currently install on the vast expanse of old PowerPC Macs that can't run current versions of MacOS but can run current versions of Ubuntu or Debian, so any that get recycled into a personal server or a DVR box or whatever will have users pointing out any problems and requesting they be fixed.
And for the most part portability is portability: If you find x86 assembly somewhere and replace it with portable C and an ifdef to use the asm only on x86, or fix an endian issue, you haven't just fixed it for PowerPC or SPARC, you've fixed it for everyone.
This, incidentally, is why having a single architecture is so unhealthy: It promotes everyone forgetting about portability entirely, which prevents new, better architectures from taking hold merely because it's so much more work to port the existing installed base of software.
I run Raspbian, another Debian-based distro, on my Raspberry Pi (ARMv6 CPU) and haven't run into any missing packages yet. Can't imagine there are many projects out there these days that are still architecture-specific, outside of compilers and JITs and so forth, many of which (e.g. LuaJIT, V8, LLVM) already support ARM.
It is really promising for the current software written against glibc and friends to have all these arm devices running homebrew ARM builds without many hitches.
Especially compared to a platform like, say, Windows, where even though there is an ARM version (Windows RT) which is extremely stripped down and awful on all fronts, there is no software for it because of API compatibility issues and the fact that without open source recompiling most of the Windows software catalog is impossible.
For a less pretty view (and one that will only make much sense if you already understand how the Ubuntu archives are organized (poorly)), check out http://ports.ubuntu.com/
I'd feel a little unwelcome if Hacker News was reduced to make sarcastic posts poking fun at people who want interesting tech on their smartphones.
really looking forward to it.
(Also, who cares about speed? It's not like you are going to be rendering or building on it, so even the most modest of smartphones today will be more than enough. We no longer need the latest and greatest to be productive.)
If I don't know what's available at my destination then I take the extra bag.
(although I use a 3G iPad for emergencies - it is an extra bag but only a small one)
Coupled with a powerful processor and plenty of spare solid-state memory, Ubuntu Phone will allow me to walk around and travel with my entire desktop environment in my pocket -- including round-the-clock access to everything available in official and third-party Ubuntu repositories.
(Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc. when you happen to be without a laptop? No problem, Ubuntu Phone will allow you to install and run all these things on your phone.)