Canonical’s ambitious $32-million project to kickstart its Ubuntu-powered smartphone has seen slow progress after the first few days of funding. With just 16 of the 30 funding days remaining, the project sits at a quarter of its required funding.

We’re not sure what else Canonical can do to help boost interest, especially after it reshuffled pricing and even running a contest to win a personalised Edge. When the project was announced funding streamed in at the rate of $1-million a day, but since then interest has waned. The best bet, now, is if it drastically reshuffled prices – again – and made it more affordable. That might come at the expense of being less ambitious with the phone’s specifications – after all, while a 128GB 8-core smartphone sounds tempting, shouldn’t the point of Ubuntu be that it’s accessible by mere mortals with regular budgets and normal hardware?

Either that, or Mr. Shuttleworth could go through his black book and phone up some contacts to ask for some real life ubuntu in the form of generous donation. Too bad Mr. Bezos has interests in Android, we hear he has a lot of free cash.