Ubuntu wants its own place in the market so bad that it's willing to go where everyone else has gone before. Canonical, the UK-based company behind Ubuntu, is making its very own Ubuntu OS-running smartphone. Apparently, rumors of this began over a year ago, and Ubuntu fans have long awaited this. After teaming up with Meizu and BQ, it looks like we can already expect these bad boys to go on sale as early as next week.

It's called the Aquaris E4.5 smartphone, which, if you feel like you've heard of it before, that's because BQ made it running Android. Now, Ubuntu's Edition keeps all the same hardware, and luckily, it has a lot of the same specs competing smartphones have. This is good, considering the company's attempt at the Ubuntu Edge, a device marketed as both a desktop computer and a phone, was a failed one (ZD Net).

The smartphone has a (not-too-exciting) 4.5-inch, 540x960 resolution, runs a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek Cortex A7 processor, with 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage (Engadget). It also features a rear-facing camera with 8MPs, and a front-facing with 5MPs. Hardware wise, nothing is too terribly different about this phone, but perhaps that's not what Canonical and BQ intended. Rather, an interesting sales strategy is how the companies hope to break the mold.

A “low-key” launch will happen in European countries only, available in a series of flash sales that the company will announce via Twitter. This is obviously a marketing tactic Canonical thinks will create some buzz, saying it will help “avoid the pain faced by other platforms that tried to push their handsets to the mass-market too early”. Next Monday will be the first flash sale, with the device being sold for 169.90 Euros ($195). While Canonical has been stressing that it's still “actively working on a US device strategy”, BQ apparently has no plans to sell the smartphone outside of Europe.