Ubuntu Edge Campaign Set To Close At $12M USD

The Ubuntu Edge crowd-sourced smart-phone campaign is set to end tonight, but Canonical is short by twenty million dollars on its crowd-funding campaign and there's been no last minute surprises to push the Ubuntu-powered converged device ahead.

At the time of writing there's been $12,465,809 (USD) committed of the $32,000,000 goal to produce a next-generation smart-phone powered by Ubuntu Linux that is powerful enough to compement a desktop PC. The hope was to ship Ubuntu Edge in the first half of 2014.

Canonical had high hopes, but there's nine hours left to this campaign and no last minute surprise announcements have come of either Mark Shuttleworth stepping in to finance the rest of the campaign, any significant corporate backers getting in at the last minute, or any other fundamental shifts for the project to satisfy their thirty-two million dollar request.

We'll see though if any phone vendors -- particularly from their Carrier Advisory Group -- decide to step up and ship an Ubuntu-powered phone/tablet themselves in the months ahead.