Today at Mobile World Conference (MWC) 2022 in Barcelona, Spain, Canonical and Vodafone unveiled a prototype of their cloud-based smartphone.
The phone makes use of Canonical’s Anbox Cloud technology, which is a virtualization technology for Android that lets mobile applications be streamed. In this new device prototype, only basic functionality remains on the phone itself, while most computation is done in the cloud.
The device itself only needs to be capable of basic video-decoding capabilities. This minimum requirement will enable simple devices to gain the functionality of a smartphone.
According to Canonical, this technology will provide more control over performance and infrastructure costs and enable companies to scale mobile devices based on user demand.
The company believes Anbox Cloud will help increase cloud gaming adoption because it will enable graphic and memory-intensive games to be scaled to a large number of users while still keeping the low levels of latency that these games require.
Enterprises will be able to make use of Anbox Cloud to deliver applications to employee devices while maintaining data privacy and compliance.
“Canonical is dedicated to enabling customers to drive new innovations and we’re pleased to have collaborated with Vodafone on the Cloud Smartphone project,” said Simon Fels, technical lead of Anbox Cloud at Canonical. “With the right teamwork and technology, it’s exciting to see what’s possible with 5G today”.
