Canonical's founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that pre-loaded Ubuntu smartphones won't be hitting stores until next year. This is contrary to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal that smartphones running the open source Ubuntu operating system would be arriving as soon as October 2013.

Shuttleworth has now clarified that Ubuntu 13.10, a smartphone-friendly version of the operating system, will be available for users in October with developer preview builds available this week. However, Ubuntu handsets won’t be coming until the first quarter of 2014 as they still require months of carrier testing.

The company is reportedly working with an OEM partner (is it Motorola, HTC, Sony or Samsung or some Chinese vendor, we don't know?) on both low-end and high-end smartphones. Unlike Google's Nexus devices these devices will be fully controlled by these partners or cellular carrier that end up selling them.

As announced earlier, Canonical’s operating system will today be made available for Google's Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus handsets and Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets for developer testing.