Woof woof!

Last week I fell into a discussion with Mark, Pat, and others about the importance of being able to really use a piece of software to really know how far there is between where you are, and a shippable state. Of everything that is missing, it's hard to know what is really the most important unless you can really use it and find what you have to work around, versus what you can just do without.

Out of this conversation was born the idea that we should drive as hard as we can to making it so that we can use our phones with Ubuntu Touch as our real daily phones as soon as possible. Really eat our own dogfood, so to speak. woof!

So, we committed our teams to making it so that by end of May, the phone images will be usable as our daily phones, defined as the following:

• You can make and receive phone calls
• You can make and receive sms messages
• You can browse the web on 3g data
• You can browse the web on wifi
• You can switch between wifi and 3g data
• The proximity sensore dims the screen when you lift the phone to talk on it
• You can import contacts from somewhere, and you can add and edit contacts
• When you update your phone your user data is retained, even if updating with phablet-flash

We believe that at least some of us will be able to really dogfood if we accomplish that. Of course, there will be a lot missing. Off the bat, I can thinking of things like the ability to find and install new apps, hardware not working on certain reference hardware (camera on Nexus 7 for example?), lots of missing features in existing apps, etc... However, in my experience, progress accelerates when people are using, in addition to building, software.