Big question is: is there room for both an Ubuntu mobile OS and a Firefox mobile OS?

It has been a long time since Canonical announced the Ubuntu Edge smartphone campaign on Indiegogo. It raised an incredible $12 million dollars, but — equally incredible — it still fell around $20 million short of its lofty goals. However, that didn’t derail Canonical’s agenda of bringing its desktop Linux OS, Ubuntu, to mobile devices. In fact, judging by this video demo, the project is still going strong.

A prevalent theory regarding the Edge campaign suggests that Canonical’s lofty $32 million funding goal meant that the company never actually thought the campaign would succeed. Instead, it just launched the campaign to get the word out for mobile Ubuntu, as well as drum up some good press; if the campaign goal was magically met, then there would be no harm in using all that money to build some phones. If the goal really was simply to get the word out, then it definitely worked — we’re all still talking about Ubuntu on mobile devices to this day (whenever there’s news, at least). The operating system’s transition to mobile is shaping up to look quite good.