We have some hot news from the Ubuntu land, as Canonical's Michael Hall has just teased us with a photo from his Nexus 4 smartphone running the latest development version of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

In the respective image attached to the right side of the article, you can see applications like the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the GIMP image editor running on top of the Ubuntu Touch's Unity 8 interface.

The image came with the following message from Mr. Hall: "I'm just gonna leave this teaser here. More on this will be coming soon." But then he mentioned in a comment that what you see in the screenshot is work in progress and a lot of work needs to be done to make those applications useful.

Therefore, looking at the image we could only assume that the Ubuntu Touch developers are working on implementing the possibility to install and run various applications from the Ubuntu Linux software repositories on any Ubuntu Phone devices.

It's all part of the Ubuntu convergence

Being very curious about what's going on, we've contacted Mr. Hall to find out more about the screenshot. His response came quick and he informed us that we were right to assume that users will be able to run any desktop application on the small screen of Ubuntu phones.

To give you guys some technical details about what you see in the screenshot, that's XMir running X11 applications on the 4.5-inch screen of a Nexus 4 smartphone. The code is very young and full of bugs, and as you can see, the applications are not yet themed.

Anyway, the ultimate goal of the Ubuntu Touch developers is to be make the mobile OS run any graphical application from the Ubuntu software repositories, and it is all part of the Ubuntu convergence. Soon, we will have more infoabout this, along with detailed instructions on how to run those apps on your Ubuntu phones.