Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth has been quoted as saying that they are aiming to launch the first generation smartphones based on Ubuntu in October this year.

This is pretty exciting considering these devices were originally expected to launch sometime next year.

The company is going to provide an early build to third party developers to test their apps on. This build would be optimized for Samsung Galaxy Nexus device that comes loaded with Android.

Shuttleworth further said that they would be focusing on two large markets initially. It is not clear which ones though. We imagine, Africa and Asia would be high on priority list considering it would be very hard to be competitive in North America and Europe.