Canonical today made available Ubuntu 13.10 for desktop and smartphones. Canonical plans to bring Ubuntu smartphone devices to market in 2014. The desktop version of Ubuntu 13.10 reflects much of that progress, with scopes that organise home, apps, music, video content, lower device memory and graphics requirements and improvements in battery and memory efficiency.

Ubuntu 13.10 includes a wide range of mobile core apps including a browser, calendar, clock, weather, and calculator. This release also introduces the full SDK with a complete set of tools to develop apps for Ubuntu devices. It includes templates and extensions, theming, automatic orientation and easy to use UI tools for fast application development. The SDK supports both native and HTML5 development.

The Ubuntu Dash brings content straight to your desktop, searching more than 50 online sources through scopes. Ubuntu 13.10 introduces a Smart Scope on both desktop and phone which combines results from many different scopes automatically and learns individual user preferences so that search results improve for each user over time. In 13.10, the Dash includes many new search scopes including Wikipedia, Amazon, Google News and Flickr, and can be configured for privacy or specific search preferences.

MIR, the new open source graphics stack which supports higher frame-rates in games and mobile applications is enabled by default for smartphones and available as an option for desktops. Mir promises performance improvements for games, with better access to the latest underlying graphics capabilities of modern devices and a simplified driver model for widespread hardware support.

Ubuntu 13.10 is available for download from the 17th October 2013 at ubuntu.com/download.