Will USB microphone work (on Fairphone 2)? And: battery usage?

Atacama

Hello friends o' freedom,

I'm considering installing Ubuntu on my Fairphone 2. One reason is that I want to use a USB microphone (Samson GoMic) with the FP2. No luck with that in Android.

Before I wipe my phone, could anyone confirm whether Ubuntu Touch may support the mic like a 'regular' distro?

Also, does anyone have experience with how long the phone's battery would then last? The mic does not have its own power source, so must draw from whatever it is attached to. Perhaps it just uses too much power in practice, and that is the reason it's not available in Android?

(In fact, what is Ubuntu Touch's battery usage in general, no devices attached, compared to Android?)

thanks in advance!

advocatux

@atacama I'm afraid the only way to really know the answer is testing it yourself because I don't think a lot of people have enjoyed the FP2 + GoMic experience to share here ;)

What I can tell you is there's a great chance that if it doesn't work on Android, it isn't going to work on UT either.

I don't know about the current FP2 battery consumption but, talking in general, some improvements are being develop for xenial now.

Atacama

Thanks for the answer, advocatux.

I was hoping that USB device recognition would have been carried over more or less unchanged from desktop Ubuntu, but I'll prepare for a cup of no beans then ;-)

I'll try and give it a whirl in the near future, since I'm keen to try UT in any case. If I get to that point, I'll report back here.

advocatux

@atacama you're welcome. On Ubuntu desktop we can talk to the hardware directly, on UT we need to talk to the hardware using a middleman, so to speak.

You can see on https://halium.org/img/architecture.png how that project is trying to unify the Hardware Abstraction Layer.

Flohack

While the Fairphone has USB OTG support, its not clear what will happen if you connect it:

The mic might not be able to talk with the device if it is not also USB-OTG capable
The microphone might be recognized, but then the sound routing will ignore it. It could work for the Ubuntu part, but probably you cannot use it for calls (Android part).

BR