Motorola is Trying That 'Your Phone Can Be a PC' Thing Again (engadget.com) 133
A decade after the failed Atrix 4G Laptop Dock, Motorola is taking another stab at turning a phone into your computer. From a report: By way of an Android 11 update, Edge Plus users on Verizon can now connect the handset to a bigger screen for a desktop-style experience in the vein of Samsung's Dex. In a nutshell, that means you'll be able to access all the productivity, gaming and streaming apps on your phone on a monitor or TV. Motorola hopes that you'll use it for everything from editing work documents and making video calls (which should look great thanks to the solid collection of cameras on the Edge Plus) to playing Fortnite -- or a cloud gaming service like Xbox Game Pass or Google Stadia (via a Bluetooth controller) -- to watching Netflix. The new "Ready For" platform uses a multi-window interface that launches when you connect to a screen through the USB-C or HDMI port. You can also add accessories like a keyboard or mouse to further match the feel of a desktop. There's no dedicated app and you can use your phone as a second screen while working on a bigger display. To help with that, Motorola is releasing a "Ready For" dock on April 19th on Amazon, with pricing to be announced closer to launch.
I would love this. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love for Phones and PCs to merge. For all but the most high end uses, there is really no reason for them not to. Phones have plenty of power and memory to function as usable PCs, and even have support for a mouse and keyboard and can project to a larger screen.
The only real problem is that the Apps function terribly on larger screens. This is why Android tablets have mostly fallen flat. If Apps were better designed to take advantage of larger screens it would be great to have ONE real personal computer.
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Then there is limitations on the hardware. Sure phones might be close to catching with PCs, but PCs are still much faster.
Then you got to worry about the limitations built into phones OSes. An incredibly big issue is the fact that Android will only allow one audio output at a time. And there is multi monitor support. Do the current phones even support this?
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You're thinking about it from the wrong angle. Start from the bottom of the market. If you have a Chromebook, this is a 100% replacement. If you don't use a PC as anything more than email and browsing, this is a 100% replacement. If you do gaming and content creation it fails, but that's a small portion of the market.
And as more people use these, the limitations of the OS will become less of a problem as the developers cater to the market. Its not going to be a next year thing, but in a decade almost n
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You're thinking about it from the wrong angle. Start from the bottom of the market. If you have a Chromebook, this is a 100% replacement. If you don't use a PC as anything more than email and browsing, this is a 100% replacement. If you do gaming and content creation it fails, but that's a small portion of the market.
And as more people use these, the limitations of the OS will become less of a problem as the developers cater to the market. Its not going to be a next year thing, but in a decade almost nobody will have a standalone PC- it will all be on your phone in your pocket at all times.
Yep. In fact, i'd venture to say the typical PC usage involves email, photos, streaming and social media. And since the pandemic, playing Roblox or Minecraft (at least in households with kids.) People can do most of those things quite well with a mobile phone, so having the ability to "dock it" with a PC-like station would be a good sell.
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Haha, I'm sorry, but, you're showing your age. The PC is not, and hasn't been for a couple years, what you mentioned.
Here in Latin America PCs are becoming rare in households as most people shift to "personal devices". PCs are becoming "workstations" rather than media consumption devices. The big exception being "gamer" PCs but this is only for diehard gamers.
For over 10 years this has been the trend. In the 90s we had "no computers", then "the shared family desktop computer", then "laptops", then "all in o
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I've done plenty of content creation on an iPad that's not as powerful as the currently available iPhones. I see no reason, with the right apps, my iPad/iPhone with dock couldn't replace all but my 3D Graphics workstation. DAWs are available that could do all but my most outlandish arrangements on the current gen iPad/iPhone, and that's my only other strenuous content creation outside graphics. I'd imagine non-creative types would be perfectly comfortable if the apps could be made to use both a regular P
Screen issue (Score:3)
The only real problem is that the Apps function terribly on larger screens. .
I agree with you, it is entirely a screen issue, at least for most browsing, video, and productivity apps. (Those who want to play games on the discrete monitor will have other issues).
Many people already use a Chromebook tablet, Surface or iPad as their sole PC, so I reckon most app categories already deal well with larger monitors, in some mode. (It's certainly true on iPad, I have not gotten a close look at the others).
Getting past the tiny screen of a phone, especially for long sessions at the keyboar
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Yeah, that would be nice, full Linux or Windows on a phone, just connect a mouse and keyboard (if needed) and maybe a monitor. As long as it can run normal software and not just "apps" and can show normal version of web pages and not just "mobile version".
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The closest to this is an ultrabook with USB-C that supports DisplayPort and USB-PD.
This is a small laptop and not a phone, but, you can connect it through a single connector (USB-C) to a docking station that will both charge the laptop, and output DisplayPort through the USB connector. With Thunderbolt you can even have an external graphics card - a RTX3080 over USB-C? Yes indeed.
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I have a few GPD palmtops - those are nice. I don't connect them to external monitors, but the devices themselves are nice to use when I do not want to bring my full-sized laptop and the palmtops are small enough to fit in a pocket. They're x86 as well, so, can run any program that a full-sized laptop or desktop would run (even if it is slower).
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I don't think most people would agree with you that Android tablets have "mostly fallen flat".
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp... [idc.com]
https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN2... [yna.co.kr]
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They have. They do not even compete with the iPad anymore.
Sure, if you want a nasty tablet for playing video with terrible sound for under 50 bucks, Android is the way to go.
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iPads have ~35% market share. What is the rest of the market if it isn't Android?
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp... [idc.com]
https://www.gizmochina.com/202... [gizmochina.com]
I guess >50% of the tablet market doesn't agree with your assessment of the state of Android tablets.
Apple may be the largest seller of tablets on a company by company basis but they are also the only ones selling iOS tablets and there are dozens of companies selling Android tablets.
Re:I would love this. (Score:4, Insightful)
The only real problem is that the Apps function terribly on larger screens. This is why Android tablets have mostly fallen flat. If Apps were better designed to take advantage of larger screens it would be great to have ONE real personal computer.
Maybe a Windows 8-style change in system appearance, applied to apps, would span the divide?
I'll show myself out...
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I'm not at all sure what you mean, but...
Is it so difficult for a app to have two user interfaces, one on the native phone, a second in "desktop mode"?
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Is it so difficult for a app to have two user interfaces, one on the native phone, a second in "desktop mode"?
Roughly, twice as difficult.
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We've been doing that for a few years now with our internal apps, offering a seamless transition between desktop and mobile. The design we're using now works surprisingly well, but does leave the desktop view a lot less 'dense' than it would be otherwise. At least, the ones we've done already.
I can see where some apps would have trouble, but I don't think the problem is impossible to solve -- we just need to think about the UI a bit differently.
Long gone are the days when we'd design 'screens' on special
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My pithy joke about showing myself out is because 1) mentioning Windows on
Anyway, just a bad joke, poorly told. I'll be h
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All I would need is one good RDP app and ssh.
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And a browser and decent text editor, a real shared clipboard, and something akin to SnagIt or the Snipping Tool, for me.
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Android has that, and it works surprisingly well.
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I would love for Phones and PCs to merge.
I wouldn't. I want my phone to stay relatively simple and the hardware and software designers to stay focused on its primary use case.
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How about an ultrabook with an USB-C docking station? It can even charge your laptop while it breaks out to HDMI, extra USB, and even ethernet. Through a single USB-C connector.
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I like the concept, but nobody produces apps that perform equally usefully on large and small screens.
Heck, half of the time I can't get apps to be useable between a 4k monitor and a "tiny" 1080p screen. The "phonepc" would be mostly unusable in one of its 2 modes.
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The Windows Phone OS did a pretty good job of that, at least for browser and the terminal server client. Of course Ballmer starved it of resources and then abandoned it entirely, and it's unlikely to get a second chance in the current market.
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I like the concept, but nobody produces apps that perform equally usefully on large and small screens.
One potential big-hammer fix for that; include both the guts of a cell phone, and the guts of a desktop computer, all miniaturized into the same case, and let them run independently of each other.
Sitting at your desk in front of your monitor and keyboard? Okay, the device in your pocket is now a Mac Mini, connected via bluetooth.
Walking downtown? Okay, now the device is an iPhone.
Add some clever file-sharing/data integration features, and now you've got the best of both worlds, at only twice the price (or
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What seems to becoming more the norm isn't that your phone is your PC, but the cloud is your PC. It matters less whether you're using your phone, your desktop or your laptop, the data in on the Internet and they all have apps to access it.
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Having tried out DEX, one of the big issues is Hardware Compatibility. Just hooking up a display I need just the right monitor, otherwise the display will be shaky. It reminds me of Using Linux back in the 1990's where it works fine if you have just the right hardware, but if you use something else (often the cheaper equipment) it will not work as well and cause problems.
Part of the success and relatively stability of mobile devices over PC's is the fact that you have an OS tightly integrated with a limit
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The vendors have actively resisted this, too. I don't think Apple is ready to give up their desktop computer sales to people who already own iPhones. It's also a peripheral support nightmare for Apple, their rigid refusal to allow much, if any, peripheral support on the iPhone does not bode well for its desktop status.
Beyond Apple, there's also the issues of application support. Most application vendors would probably prefer to keep selling a limited/crippled phone/tablet application than a more fully fe
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I honestly don't think it's just revenue, I think it's a first mover problem.
Few phone manufacturers are investing in allowing people to do this because people use their phones like desktops because their are few applications that really allow for it because the developers don't want to invest because few phone manufacturers are investing in it....
Really, Google needs to bite on this. If Google made this a core function within Android, through a standardized USB-C dock system AND provided funding for develo
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BUT! Google instead has decided to invest in their proprietary ChromeOS, which is seeing some success, so they don't really have the incentive to do this.
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Obviously you don't work in the real world. Phones don't come close to being able to be used as ones primary machine in a work environment. Email sucks on a phone, you can't write letters in Word or whatever on a phone and get it to be reasonably coherent, not mention if you want to add a multitude of pictures for something like a manual. Spreadsheets? Forget it. No way, no how. Want to manipulate a pdf on a phone? How about a ticket
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Obviously you don't work in the real world. Phones don't come close to being able to be used as ones primary machine in a work environment. Email sucks on a phone, you can't write letters in Word or whatever on a phone and get it to be reasonably coherent, not mention if you want to add a multitude of pictures for something like a manual. Spreadsheets? Forget it. No way, no how. Want to manipulate a pdf on a phone? How about a ticketing system for tens of thousands of end users? Print drivers?
Just like it would be great to have one real personal driving vehicle. No trucks, no SUVs, no cars, just one vehicle to rule them all.
All of those things you listed can be and are regularly done on cell phones. I honestly don't know what you are talking about. MS Office even exists for Android and it's really pretty capable.
I don't want a one sized fits all driving vehicle. I just want ONE driving vehicle. Most people don't need a truck AND and SUV AND a car. Most people just need one of those.
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Sorry, you're just being a grumpy old man used to doing things a certain way. Email only sucks on phones if you're used to "a full email client" which is honestly a relic from a past I don't want to go back to. I haven't used an email client in over a decade. The web version of gmail suits me just fine.
Bitching about "email on phone sucks" and "spreadsheets in phones suck" just prove you're being a stubborn ass. Spreadsheets suck on phones because you aren't using a mouse. Take the same phone, enlarge its
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Sorry, you're just being a grumpy old man used to doing things a certain way. Email only sucks on phones if you're used to "a full email client" which is honestly a relic from a past I don't want to go back to. I haven't used an email client in over a decade. The web version of gmail suits me just fine.
What a waste of time even on a mobile phone there are email clients infinitely more productive than webmail.
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You're a little confused. The idea here is that your phone and desktop would be the same device, yes, but you wouldn't do everything through the phone's interface. You'd drop your phone into a dock to gain access to a full-sized keyboard, a mouse, and a large display for "real work".
If you've ever used a dock for your a laptop, it's the same basic idea, though I'd expect laptop-style docks to be very popular should this idea catch on.
For a lot of users, I can see that working just fine.
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If it can show apps in windows, that would be a major benefit. But from the picture it looks like it is stuck with the basic "split screen" function in Android, which is of course pants even on a phone, and even more so on a monitor. Good idea, poor execution, classic Motorola?
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You are probably going to be right, but I could still be hopeful that we will get it right one of these days.
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This is simply because phones don't really have the screen real estate to draw window borders. But if "phone as desktop" becomes a thing, I think the desktop manager in phones could be adapted to work in full/split screen when in phone mode, and "traditional desktop" when on a big screen.
Wait, doesn't Chrome OS already do this?
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For all intents and purposes, they could merge. A Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB of RAM has less CPU and RAM than many Android phones, and may not be the fastest PC, but it can do the job. With a faster CPU like what is on a flagship phone, a phone could run as fast as some low-end PCs, perhaps with enough RAM for most things.
The issues keeping this from happening:
1: Almost all ARM stuff requires closed source SoC drivers. Coaxing the SoC makers into giving up their precious IP for OS tier drivers or even ope
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They're trying that again? That's been the goal since Sun introduced Java (remember "Write once, run everywhere"?) Seems like every time they get close the OS standards change again.
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Gross (Score:2)
Phone need to go for power efficiency and not power.
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Phone need to go for power efficiency and not power.
Why not do both?
The A14 has six cores: Two for high performance and four for efficiency.
If you don't need power, the high-performance cores can be shut down.
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Phone can't compare to the GPU I have in the desktop.
Then there is the RAM. My Desktop has 32GB, and I can still double that if I want. Same with the lappy. That has 16GB that could be 32GB if need.
Then storage. Desktop has 12TB, with 60% of that being full. Lappy have 2TB with 25% of that being full..
Also, ethernet is still faster and more stable tha
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Do you need someone to link the definition of "example"?
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What do you use your PC for that you don't also use your computer for? 8^)
I assume you meant to say you use your phone for different things from your PC.
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It's perhaps a bit of a Freudian slip. These days, I'd argue a smartphone better qualifies as one's "Personal Computer" than a desktop machine. It's literally with you a large percentage of your waking hours, and maybe your sleeping hours too. It's the convenient, always-there, go-to computing device for a vast and growing percentage of the general public. Smartphones are the new PC, and PCs are the new "workstations", given that's where we still get work done.
Of course, I'm not foolish enough to believ
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*YOU* use.
Not everyone has to live like you.
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Harmless unless used
If you use it, you are connected to a power source and have lower efficiency requirements during that time.
When not in use, it doesn't necessarily have any impact at all.
Basically it's no worse than enabling split-screen on phones, a feature that is pretty widespread at this point, that also has no impact until actually used.
It's not like their going from some single-task RTOS to a multitasking desktop OS for this, Android already is a broadly multitasking operating system, just with agg
I had a LapDock 100 (Score:3)
For my "Droid". At the time, ten years ago , it was a decent solution. Laptops cost a lot more, and the Droid was already decently powerful for a phone. The screen wasn't laptop-sized, but it was much more usable than the phone-screen; same with the keyboard. I got a lot of remote work done on that, especially when extremely remote..
But that was then, this is now. Ten years ago, we weren't all already tethered to our devices. And it wasn't so easy to connect a random monitor or TV to your phone. Voice input was uncommon and sketchy. Today, if you really want to use your phone's software as a work environment, a wireless keyboard and a video cable will, most of the time, get you there.
Or... any handy computer with a web browser, logged into Google G-Suite or Microsoft Office365.
Motorola, that day has passed.
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Ten years ago, we weren't all already tethered to our devices. And it wasn't so easy to connect a random monitor or TV to your phone. Voice input was uncommon and sketchy. Today, if you really want to use your phone's software as a work environment, a wireless keyboard and a video cable will, most of the time, get you there
1. It is still not easy to connect your phone to a random TV/monitor as most of them do not have video out on them.
2. Voice input might be more common now, but it is still sketchy and doesn't work all that well.
3. You can't just plug in a wireless keyboard and a video cable into phones. Almost none of them have video out like said above, or have a full size USB port for me to insert the receiver.
4. As for work software, the Office phone apps pale compared to the PCs versions. For now at least. I also h
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Bluetooth keyboards and mice work pretty well with most phones. As for video, maybe you can bring along a Roku stick or a Chromecast (both are small, cheap, and can draw power from the TV's USB port) and screencast to it.
Re:I had a LapDock 100 (Score:5, Funny)
You can't just plug in a wireless keyboard ... into phones.
I just imagined you trying to plug your wireless keyboard into your phone.
It already is a PC. (Score:2)
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Many of them aren't universal, since only approved programs can be run.
There's one individual that holds the thing, but many others also use it, for data collection.
Of course none of that is even what they're talking about, which is "PC" as a form factor. So what they actually mean is "desktop".
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Look, no (Score:3)
The biggest fundamental reason this won't work is that phones don't have enough I/O bandwidth. Their storage is too slow, they only have one USB port, and all additional I/O has to go through either that or through the wifi which is also generally slow compared to a full fledged desktop NIC. As such, any time you do any tasks that people are still commonly doing on desktops instead of on a phone or tablet you will punch your phone square in the nuts.
The only thing people do on a phone that really requires a bigger screen to do well is web browsing, and phones are terrible at running browsers because of their I/O limitations.
I love the idea but it's just not practical. Making a device as small as a phone useful as a PC is not reasonable. It can only cost a lot of money and still wind up half-assed.
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The Windows Phone OS seemed to run a browser adequately when I plugged it into a USB2 port replicator, and the Terminal Server Client worked well on the external monitor. If MS can do it then there should be some Android phone manufacturer should be able to with USB3.
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I don't know where you think a web browser is going to stress the I/O of the phone, phones already handle video-out, keyboard-in, and a few MB/sec over Wifi without an issue. That makes it "as useful" for 90% of people who are only going to consume video, social media, and maybe online shopping and word processing.
That being said, people who really want to use their phone on a big screen are probably already casting to a TV, and don't need a new one from Motorola.
If they have a computer monitor, they've got
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The biggest fundamental reason this won't work is that phones don't have enough I/O bandwidth. Their storage is too slow.
This has not been my experience. Phone hardware is amazing. TB storage, 6 GB ram, 4k display, real-time 4k h.265 encoding. While the software (android) is a bit lame I can't complain too much. Solutions like Termux give me all the Linux crap I could ever want including C compilers.
Their storage is too slow, they only have one USB port, and all additional I/O has to go through either that or through the wifi which is also generally slow compared to a full fledged desktop NIC.
The only thing people do on a phone that really requires a bigger screen to do well is web browsing, and phones are terrible at running browsers because of their I/O limitations.
Speedtest website on my phone 110mbit, desktop 126mbit. Not my definition of terrible.
they only have one USB port,
If your keyboard does not have an integrated hub they are dirt cheap. PC hardware uses internal hubs and does not offer dedicated controll
The concept has promise. (Score:2)
While the concept of this has promise, the most important component to this is software. It seems that the outcome most likely to succeed would be if it hybridized into being something like a chromebook interface. It would still be a niche product like chromebook but eliminate synchronization issues.
I don't see this succeeding but if they have put years of software development into it then they just might pull it off.
Market probably not there (Score:2)
No niche between a large phone and a small laptop (Score:3)
I don't really see an upside to this.
In all places where anything larger than a phone is too large, a phone is enough.
And in all other places, for the weight/size/... penalty of a display+keyboard+mouse (or maybe touchpad or touchscreen) you can carry a full-fledged laptop (ultraportable, or maybe tablet plus keyboard cover/...).
Maybe this could have been a "thing" when flagship phones had 5" screens and weren't very usable for - let's say - browsing non-optimized web pages. Now with phones pushing the 7" display diagonal (almost twice the surface), I don't see a place for anything "in the middle", between phone and ultraportable laptop.
I've also used "screen mirroring" from mobile phone to smart TV and the experience is 95% of the time OK - sometimes the TV image is a few refreshes late while zooming in or panning a picture, and it stays late, and it won't "fix" itself until after some more panning.
While that's bad enough when viewing pictures, I really wouldn't want that to happen when actually working.
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I can see an immediate value in this, guys working on the top of ladders and in lift buckets need something small and portable but when they need to complete their reports at the end of the day they need a mouse, keyboard and monitor. Being able to just take the photos they took at the top of the ladder and drag them into the commissioning document or service ticket rather than have to fool around with trying to transfer from one system to another would save them a lot of time and pain. I'm quite sure oth
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Drag and drop doesn't work on phones?
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No, Excel, Word, and Outlook are close to unusable on a phone, especially if you intend on editing several dozen elements. In the security field (which is what I work in) a camera commissioning document is generally a spreadsheet that photos of the mounting and the field of view are dragged into cells next to the camera name (dynamically updated from elsewhere in the spreadsheet) and resized appropriately. Then try to do that on a phone for a data center where you've just installed 250 cameras. Clipboard
Phones are horrible (Score:3, Insightful)
While the use-case is interesting and could be useful to some people, the current state of the smartphone industry and smartphone operating systems is unfortunately terrible.
Both Google Android and Apple's iOS are vertical eco-systems with lots of privacy issues and malware behind condescending user interfaces.
There is no way I am giving my smartphone access to important files, when the alternative is a laptop or tablet with a real desktop operating system: a computer that I, the user am in control of, where I can run software that is capable of doing the job I ask of it.
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So your complaint is nothing about phones and everything about some software on the phone then.
a computer that I, the user am in control of
Interesting requirement considering that 99% of the world's economy revolves around the use of computers specifically which are *NOT* in control of end users. Corporate IT doesn't typically like that very much.
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Rather a moot distinction as the software you can install isn't entirely at your discretion.
That's not moot, it's BS. In your instance it's not the computer you're using, it's the service. You don't even
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I can see two possibilities: either by "a real operating system" you mean Linux, and then you're part of a small minority, or you mean other desktop OSs (Windows and MacOS), in which case I don't see the big differences between them and the mobile OSs.
Either way, I don't find your argument very convincing. It seems to me that most people will lose little by using phones as their PCs.
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Phones and their UI will remain horrible (except for Linux phones but they're not really viable for mass adoption yet, perhaps in ten more years) but I'm glad for such products so I have more hardware choice for uses Motorola did not intend.
I don't care what happens to Motorola but I'd not mind buying good hardware (if theirs be such) cheap after the project fails.
But Bullwinkle that trick never works (Score:2)
When I worked at RIM (Blackberry) 10+ years ago, that was one of the goals of the company - to have their smartphones being the only device that people need.
Modern devices are a lot closer to becoming PCs than the Blackberry's were but I think the breakdown is that to get the whole experience, you need a decent keyboard and display. Maybe somebody will come up with a device that unfolds to provide a fairly large display and a decent keyboard.
Rocky is skeptical [slashdot.org]
Could be a good Chromebook alternative (Score:2)
With kids doing remote learning, the have been lots of stories about kids in poor school districts not being able to participate in remote learning, due to the family not having a computer at home, and the district not having enough Chromebooks to go around. Docking the handset to a larger screen (old LCDs are basically free on CraigsList) could be a solution.
It's a dessert topping AND a floor wax (Score:3)
Phones and tablets will never replace a desktop machine. Please stop trying to be all things to all people.
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Desktop PCs will never replace dumb terminals.
Commodity servers will never replace mainframes.
No one would ever migrate critical systems into the Cloud.
Laptops will never replace desktop PCs.
I think I've heard this song before . . .
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I agree they won't *replace* a desktop machine. But they might work well as an alternate to having a second one handy?
I'd welcome the ability to use my iPhone as an "on demand desktop", linked to a keyboard, mouse or trackpad, and large display. I'm not expecting it's going to let me plug in my ScanSnap document scanner and use it or anything like that. I'm simply thinking of the numerous situations where I need to get online and work with web-based services and sites. More screen space and better input de
Only if it Runs a Full OS (Score:3)
A keyboard mouse and monitor only turns your phone into a Chromebook.
If a Chromebook isn't good enough for your work, a phone isn't going to be either.
Phones are faster (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:3)
In 2005, there was an article about how cell phones can be computers. But then everyone said smartphones were a dumb idea .. many people .. who got modded Insightful claimed that a phone should just be for making phone calls. Apparently it was a dumb idea for phones to be internet capable.
Reference: https://www.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Note, when I said back then that phones should have a large touchscreen nobody said it was a good idea.
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I remember that article, I think I commented in it somewhere that we had just come back from vacation and were surprised to see that most of the Japanese tourists used their cellphone as their only camera too.
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Would work with iPhones (Score:2)
With only two OS updates? (Score:3)
LOL, no, stupid idea (Score:3)
LOL no fuck that shit. I got away from Microsoft for that specific set of reasons.
Furthermore phones are underpowered and overpriced compared to a general purpose computer. Personally I won't own a smartphone for all the above reasons plus more.
Stupid idea.
Ditch Android, install Windows/Linux (Score:2)
That's what's needed to turn it into a usable computer, rather than an ad-infested consumer device
Competition for Chromebooks (Score:2)
If a Chromebook is enough for a lot of people, certainly a phone should be able to do the job. And some like a real screen and a decent keyboard. This is not a bad idea - I just hope that they get the software working properly.
Good place for virtualization? (Score:2)
There's plenty of power in modern phones to do most desktop work... I agree the OS isn't right. So I wonder if this would be a good place to run a desktop under a VM type thing. As a bonus, you can still use your phone as a phone while it runs a fullsize desktop environment for web and office work.
Inevitable UI problems will not be solved (Score:2)
I'd be delighted to drop my phone into a wireless dock and charge it while using it as a PC, or do as I sometimes do now with DeX and connect using a (out of production) Microsoft HD 500 hub.
Unfortunately phone UIs are shit for desktop/notebook use and not very good for phone use. Desktop UIs make poor phone UIs. UIs suck because modern UI designers have ulterior motives and do not care about the users. Consider this carefully because they do.
Modern, fashionista UI designers are primarily artistic types who
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The main reason Macs are moving to ARM is to make Mac Mode on the iPhone more straightforward. And profit, of course.
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Granted I came off HDD i5, but the M1 gear is read-your-mind fast.
If the 13" were flippable or the kybd detached it would be a lot more useful to a lot more people.
Maybe the iPad was a transitional tech?
An actual usable-all-day keyboard is still a must for high-end use.
Phone? Small. Pocketable. Great camera.
Dial down the I-have-to-do-everything-in-my-life-through-my-phone stuff.
Phones graduated from making life easier to a distraction brick + enabling device for undocumented overtime, all making much mor
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The fanboi is strong in this one, Obi Wan . . .
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Not sure what a POS android means. Is it to pretend that iOS is better? Or Windows? Please explain.
I could agree Linux is better for my needs on a desktop, but Linux is pretty bad on mobile, so Android is still the best we can hope for.
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We know that we can do better. webOS, BB10, and Windows Phone were all better than the current offerings. It's a real shame.
I still use a BB Classic as my daily driver. Going from that to android feels like traveling back in time. I'm not looking forward to the day that I'll be forced to downgrade my phone to an android.
We really need some competition in the mobile OS space. Android is very quickly becoming the new IE6.