Ubuntu Touch has already made lots of news and hence I decided to try it on my LG Nexus 4. An important thing to note is that the currently released version of Ubuntu Touch is just a developer preview and hence far from ready for the general usage. However it does have enough features to just give a peek on how beautiful a fully functional Ubuntu Touch would be.
The main concept of the Touch UI is that user uses all the edges of the phone. It also depends a lot on swipes and hence requires your screen to be really receptive to touches.
The installation was a breezer with complete detailed information given here, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install. It did take some time to install thanks to my slow broadband connectivity. The boot time is less than 10 secs though currently the start-up looks dull without any animation. First screen shown is a circle which is supposed to contain all the latest updated messages from different application. However it currently doesn’t show anything and is just a placeholder. As you swipe over it, you are shown the home screen. This home screen is supposed to be the snapshot of your complete phone, where it shows the frequently used apps, recently contacted people, recently listened music and so on. As you swipe from right to left, you get dedicated screens for Apps, Music, People, Videos. The main concept of the Touch UI is that user uses all the edges of the phone. It also depends a lot on swipes and hence requires your screen to be really receptive to touches. The left edge panel is dedicated to show all the frequently used apps. Take your thumb to the left edge and just swipe up and down to select any of the frequently used apps. At the bottom of this panel is an option to go back to your home screen. On top left, there is a search option which is supposed to be a universal search across all data in your phone. However in the current developer preview it is not functional yet. The top edge panel is dedicated to the settings of the phone. A swipe over the top edge and you can choose to modify the settings of Battery, Data and time, Networks, Messages, Sound. In short everything to play around with your settings. All the option in the settings are working fine. Some of the basic functionality like autorotation of the screen, disabling wireless are still missing. Due to this, the wireless is always on. The right edge is used to bring the apps running in your background to focus. So shifting between apps is just a swipe from right to left.
Currently there is no way to stop your running apps and hence it means any apps that you have tried will keep running on the background till you restart.Again since this is a developer preview, this is not much of an issue. The bottom edge of the screen is owned by the app and hence this is app specific.
Over all the concept of UI making use of all the edges is very intuitive. However I do need to see how the UI will behave when autorotation is enabled. Currently when I start the music player, autorotation does happen, but the edges do not change their behavior.
From the hardware side, both the cameras are detected and working fine. The flash can be enabled disabled for the back camera. On the video mode, you can enable your flash to be on continuously. This is good to capture video in dark. However I was not able to capture the video itself. I guess, It is not yet available in the current release.
Wifi was detected fine and I have able to browse over internet without any issues. However most of the website detects the phone as an iOS and suggests me to download the iphone app.
Power consumption wise, it seems to be to early to say anything. It did last 24 hours but with very less usage. There is certainly heat generated and you can feel the heat at the back of the phone. This might be due to the continuous apps running on the background.
I was able to successfully make phone calls and send a message from it. The sound quality was good. I tried connecting my earphone but I was not able to hear anything on it. The notification is not very good as I need to go to the call window to find out if I have any miss call or new messages. May be when the first screen becomes active, these notifications will also be shown there. Also the speaker doesn’t seem to be working while talking during a call.
Few areas that I have not tested yet: 1) Audio/Video: Music and Video apps are just snapshots and are not
functional. I was not able to get Youtube to play a video on the browser. Hence overall have not been able to check the audio/video part of the phone other than listening to caller tune and voice over phone. Few points to improve:
1) UI though intuitive still needs sometime to get adjusted to.
2) Startup seems to be dull with just the first circle of latest update seen. Some animations would be nice.
Overall it seems to be a great promise and I am very eager to follow its development. The SDK to develop apps is already released and I am eager to write my first hello world app running on Ubuntu Touch. 
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For updated news about the development, please check out this link,
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/ReleaseNotes