The Bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet is now shipping and the first “real world” takes how well the device runs are starting to roll in.
Not that we haven’t had a good old looksie at it before. Mobile World Congress 2016 played host to the device, gifting us a glut of hands-on appraisals.
Back then it was repeatedly said that the code being demoed wasn’t of “shipping” quality, and that plenty of bugs were going to be ironed out in subsequent over-the-air update.
Now that the device is not just on sale but physically in customers hands, how are things looking?
Video Time
We don’t know, but OMG! reader David Wolski shared the following short video of him having a good ol’ prod around his Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition HD.
Bear in mind that this model does have a marginally slower processor (quad-core, 1.3GHz) versus the Full-HD model (quad-core, 1.5GHz), but it is still the same chipset, same amount of RAM, and so forth.
And, as you’ll see, things work pretty well considering that the device is, much like the phones, still aimed at developers and enthusiasts rather than Mr & Mrs Mainstream n’ co.
David also posted the following mini-review in a comment on our ‘…begins shipping‘ post yesterday:
“I got to play with the bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Tablet today.
It does feel like an unfinished product and I believe its intended target audience are developers.
Firefox 44, Gimp 2.8, LibreOffice 4.4.6.3, Gedit 3.10.4 are some of the apps/programs that are preinstalled from the app store and convergence is a nice touch. The GUI is quite sluggish and rough around the corners, but so far nothing crashed even once. Kernel is version 3.10.93 aarch64.
I’d say it’s a good start and it reminds me of very early Android versions. The ability to switch into a windowed desktop-mode has a lot of potential. The terminal allows me to ssh into my servers and to actual work.
A lot of things are still missing: There’s no proper file manager yet, the choice of CLI tools is still quite limited.
Mind though, you can’t just apt-get install packages without remounting the root partition in read-write mode with ADB and breaking OTA updates. I didn’t want to do that yet because Ubuntu Touch 16.04 might be coming to this tablet soonish.”
We won’t be able to do a hands-on review of this table ourselves (we’re too poor). But if you’re lucky enough to have snagged one you can help us out. We want to hear your thoughts, both good and bad . We want to assemble a sort of crowd-sourced review of the M10 using your tweets, photos, videos and comments, ensuring we cover every angle.
Please do get in touch through any of our social media accounts, via our tip-form., of through my regular e-mail: joey [at] ohso [dot] io.