The Ubuntu Touch team at Canonical has announced earlier the release schedule for the upcoming OTA software updates for Ubuntu Phone devices, and we’ve promised to give you guys more info on the whereabouts of the OTA-9 update.

Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report right after announcing the upcoming OTA schedules, which you can read all about in our previous report. He thus informed all of us that the anticipated Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 would not be delayed after all, and it would be sent out to supported devices starting January 27, 2016.

"Things are looking good - our final OTA-9 candidate image passed preliminary tests and now entered the final stage. This release we should make it on time without any delays: thanks to the new schedule QA had more time to test and developers more time to react to the regressions found. Good work everyone!" said Mr. Zemczak.

OTA-9.5 to arrive on February 10

If you've already read our previous report (link above) about the release schedules for the two nearest updates for Ubuntu Phones, you know by now that there will be a post-OTA-9 hotfix. It is called OTA-9.5, and it should arrive with a bunch of fixes and base changes for convergence next month, on February 10, 2016.

In the meantime, the Ubuntu Touch devs are working hard to add more awesome features to the next major OTA update, the OTA-10. Some of those new features have already landed earlier today on the rc-proposed channel, and among them is a new Media Player app with translation template fixes.

Moreover, there is also an updated Web Browser app that brought features like auto-focus address-bar in wide mode and a patch that no longer allows multiple instances to run simultaneously. Other than that, a new libpinyin library has been imported from the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) branch.