Spanish smartphone company BQ recently launched its latest smartphone, the Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition, to the European market. The new smartphone is now available for pre-order at the company's official website and costs only €199.90.

The BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu smartphone was developed in collaboration with U.K.-based Software Company Canonical Ltd. Obviously. The new smartphone runs on the Ubuntu mobile operating system which is based on Linux.

The Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition handset is only available for European countries and, according to Softpedia, the phone will begin shipping after June 22.

Canonical said on its official Google+ account, "Excited to announce that the new Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition is now available to preorder from the +BQ online store! Available in the European Union only."

"The phone hosts an impressive set of features including HD screen resolution, faster processor speed and increased camera pixel quality," Canonical added.

The Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu smartphone is a successor to the Aquaris E4.5 UE model which was released just earlier this year. The new handset is expected to come with a larger screen and improved camera capacity over its predecessor.

It has a 5 inch IPS HD 720 x 1280 pixels resolution display screen and is powered by a MediaTek quad-core Cortex A7 CPU at 1.3 GHz. The handset offers 1GB worth of RAM and 16GB internal storage memory. It comes with a 5 mega pixel front-facing camera and a 13 mega pixel rear camera.

In comparison with its predecessor, the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu has a 4.5 inch 540×960 display and only has 8GB worth of internal memory and an 8 mega pixel rear camera.

Chinese smartphone maker Meizu is reportedly planning to make the same move by launching an Ubuntu-based device, the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, in Europe.