Canonical and Meizu have signed a partnership for the distribution of Ubuntu-powered phones that should arrive in the first months of 2015. The details are still sketchy, but the information about this collaboration has been confirmed.

Details about a signed partnership between Meizu and Canonical appeared in the online Chinese media a couple of days ago, but there was no mention of a source.

As it turns out, they were right and the first details have started to arrive, although there is not much to go on. There are no details about the conditions of the agreement or even on what they are collaborating about specifically, but it's easy to guess.

Canonical has been working on Ubuntu Touch for a couple of years and they are approaching a very important milestone in the development cycle, and that is the RTM version (release to manufacture).

The operating system has been cleaned of all the bugs and all the needed features have been added. It's ready to ship on a phone, but the hardware support is still necessary.

Meizu MX Ubuntu-powered phones to arrive in a few months

Ubuntu users are used to the open source community and with the Ubuntu development cycle. Most of the decisions are transparent and it's even easy to find out details about the project.

Unlike an open source project, the details about the collaboration between the two companies have been kept secret and nothing certain is known, with a few exceptions. We talked with Meizu and they had some interesting info to share.

"Canonical’s CEO - Jane Silber attended the meeting and signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the vice president of Meizu, Li Nan. It is announced that both sides will jointly cooperate on product development and marketing both in China and Internationally."

"According to the agreement signed with Canonical, the Meizu MX series phones based on Ubuntu operating system are expected to release in the first quarter of 2015 in Europe and mainland China," reads the official statement from Meizu.

Besides the first quarter of 2015 as the launch window, it looks like Meizu is also planning to distribute the phones in Europe, not only China, which is actually very good news. There is no mention of other territories, but Meizu also has an international distribution website, so it's likely that it will be available there.

For now, Ubuntu Touch runs on Nexus 4 devices, if you want to test it. We also have a screenshot tour of the latest Ubuntu Touch RTM update.