I've been running the Aquaris E5 for the past few weeks and while it has a few bugs, I am amazed at how much smartphone functionality Canonical has put into this clean and easy new interface. Everything I expect on the "device infrastructure" is there (although obviously, apps are sorely missing). Still I'm finding it does 90% of what I need via the web apps (have owned multiple iphones and high-end androids) and it refreshingly clutter free. I can't stress the last point enough. Android feels to me like an oversatured mess of a kids playground with all its silly colours (even worse on OLED screens) while the iphone, though cleaner, is also suffering from feature creep. My E5 feels like a crisp blank sheet, like that refreshing feeling when you have a clean install of your operating system. By the way, SSH terminal into my work computer, no problem, including ANSI support. Tmux, Vim, all perfect. It's no less powerful than the full blown terminal in desktop Ubuntu (though obviously the screen is smaller).

Canonical, all is forgiven for the past few versions of Ubuntu which haven't moved forward. It's clear that you've been putting huge resource into Unity and I hope it has a huge future.

Is it still a 'normal Ubuntu' machine underneath? I'm getting a sense that you won't be easily porting X11-based apps to it - is this nonsense?

My personal desire is to have a multi-core, multi-gigabyte, 8-10+ hour battery life software development workstation, in my pocket, which can also receive phone calls. If this is the future, with Ubuntu, then color me converted.

"My personal desire is to have a multi-core, multi-gigabyte, 8-10+ hour battery life software development workstation, in my pocket, which can also receive phone calls. If this is the future, with Ubuntu, then color me converted."

That is exactly the plan and is being worked on at the moment.

X11 apps will work through XMir - they won't be touch optimised but will still work, will however be much more useable when connecting the phone to a larger display and a bluetooth mouse/keyboard.

Additionally we are working on a Qt/QML toolkit which will allow developers to write apps that work well on both mobile and desktop

I've been using it purely as a phone for now (other than the occasional ssh into the office), but it is exactly the vision you state above that puts me into the early adopter camp. I don't know about X apps. MiR is supposted to have an X-compatibility layer on it as far as I understand, just like Wayland, but the details or pitfalls are not known to me. I am going to assume that Canonical will try to steer people towards MiR, hence the controversy about the rift with the rest of the Linux community. I'm assuming that this is being watched very closely by the other distros and I don't see why we shouldn't see other full blow linux stacks on phone-like devices in the future. This is clearly the way forward and I'm going with Ubuntu now because they're the furthest ahead.