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According to the company, the pithily titled Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition 8.04 has been optimised for use with handheld internet platforms, and designed to run smoothly on Intel's Atom chips as well as with small touchscreen displays.

"We're slightly ahead of the hardware here," says Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Canonical, explaining the Samsung Q1 is the only suitable product for the software on the market currently, although several more manufacturers will be releasing products by the end of the year.

The company has

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been working with several manufacturers to tie the software in with upcoming hardware devices, although Carr declined to provide details of which.

The software has been unveiled as a developers release, based on the desktop version of the operating system and modified by Canonical developers in conjunction with the Intel Moblin.org community.

Canonical hopes that the OS will be used by manufacturers as a pre-installed operating system, despite the current trend towards customised versions of Linux.

To encourage this the The MID version of Ubuntu allows OEMs to customise the look and feel of the operating system with HTML, Flash, Clutter, Python with GTK, C/C++ with GTK and Java.

Hardware developers working on Atom based devices will be able to run the code on Intel's Crown Beach development kit as well as in the KVM emulation package released by Canonical.

Earlier this month Canonical announced that it would be creating a version of Ubuntu for netbook devices such as the Asus Eee PC and the Acer Aspire One called Netbook Remix.