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Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

maruos.com

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Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#41

Post by falcolas »

ksubedi wrote: post #8
falcolas wrote: post #3

I really wish this was a viable option, but the lack of active cooling (and mediocre passive cooling) for phones really makes the phone-as-desktop a non-starter for anything but light web browsing or text editing.

But if you think about it, the use case for almost 80% of the people out there that use laptops or desktops is for web browsing and office work (text editing etc) which phones should be able to handle well.

Think of any task that has ever caused your laptop fans to spin up, and cross that task off of what is possible on a phone-as-desktop list. No high definition video calls. No 1080p gaming. No fully functional IDEs (intellisense and interactive linting/compiling is computationally expensive). No high definition movies. Video/batch photo conversions are probably out, though may be possible at 1/10th speed.

The most successful tablet-laptop attempt thus far has active cooling simply so they don't have to throttle back performance.

It's possible that more energy efficient processors will come about and prove me wrong, but they've been working on the heat dissipation problem for decades now (yes, even in desktops/servers).

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#42

Post by falcolas »

benologist wrote: post #10
falcolas wrote: post #3

I really wish this was a viable option, but the lack of active cooling (and mediocre passive cooling) for phones really makes the phone-as-desktop a non-starter for anything but light web browsing or text editing.

The future doesn't look so bleak, Microsoft already made a phone with water cooling - https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/215724-microsoft-announce... And desktops are emerging without fans too - http://www.fanlesstech.com

Anything that involves radiant cooling relies on radiator size and surface area. Neither of which are present in abundant quantities in a phone form factor. Especially when you add a rubber case (an insulator) to avoid damage from falls.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#43

Post by fps »

cwyers wrote: post #28

If you have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, you may was well have a computer. Seriously, if you have a laptop-like enclosure for all those things to make them portable, adding a SoC to make it a PC is what, $20-$40 to be on par with this in terms of compute? And last I checked, it's still not The Year Of The Linux Desktop. This is gonna crash and burn.

You don't get the value proposition. This isn't for cost saving, it's for time saving and organization.

Here's where we are today: If I spend any significant amount of time away from one of my devices (phone, laptop, desktop), it piles up with dozens of notifications. Even with cloud based apps, there's no shared state. So when I get back to a device, I have to clear away all the notifications, assuming that they must have appeared on the other device at some point. And if I change a password on my laptop, because of one of the dozens of data breaches that have happened this month, I have to retrieve my new password out of my password manager and re-login on my phone. At any given point, 2 or 3 apps on my phone are in a "logged out" state because I use them primarily on one of my computers, so i'm actually not getting all my notifications everywhere, and I miss some of them.

Also, even with google drive, not every file on my computer is immediately available on my phone and vice versa. So if I need access to a file on the go, there's a good chance it won't be there.

I don't expect this to solve all these problems, but I'm looking forward to a day when I don't have to carry my laptop everywhere I go.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#44

Post by cwyers »

fps wrote: post #43
cwyers wrote: post #28

If you have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, you may was well have a computer. Seriously, if you have a laptop-like enclosure for all those things to make them portable, adding a SoC to make it a PC is what, $20-$40 to be on par with this in terms of compute? And last I checked, it's still not The Year Of The Linux Desktop. This is gonna crash and burn.

You don't get the value proposition. This isn't for cost saving, it's for time saving and organization. Here's where we are today: If I spend any significant amount of time away from one of my devices (phone, laptop, desktop), it piles up with dozens of notifications. Even with cloud based apps, there's no shared state. So when I get back to a device, I have to clear away all the notifications, assuming that they mus…

You can get shared notifications. I have Cortana on my Android phone pretty much exactly for this reason.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#45

Post by garou »

zeotroph wrote: post #35

I am really surprised that the "single computing / storage device" idea which can switch between different screens and input methods seamlessly (and maybe support plug-in CPUs) is just is not happening, though the concept here is a small step in that direction. Having everything in the cloud seems to have made this somewhat redundant for most users, though I still hope one day I can carry all my data around, of cours…

I prefer the idea of a phone that can be plugged on a better hardware (desktop) and quickly boot on it... without the need of turn of the phone and the changes on desktop appearing on phone...

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#48

Post by thesuitonym »

cwyers wrote: post #17
xrisk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an OS for your phone that becomes a proper desktop OS if you plug in a monitor, mouse, keyboard etc. I don’t think this has been done before, or maybe I’m just hopelessly unaware? Either way, I think it’s quite interesting.

Motorola Atrix, Ubuntu Phone, Windows Phone 10 has Continuum. It's been tried before.

Continuum is arguably a successful implementation of this idea, with the unfortunate handicap of being on a platform nobody wants.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#49

Post by JustSomeNobody »

I really hope all phone OSs go this direction. I love my laptop(s) and they're great for doing serious work, but sometime when I'm, say, composing an email on my phone and it starts getting long, I'd love to be able to plug in to a monitor and keyboard and keep going.

Re: Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone

#50

Post by notspanishflu »

sudosteph wrote: post #40

As one of the backers for the doomed "Ubuntu Phone" kickstarter, this really looks like a great alternative. I will have to play around with it this weekend for sure.

Another interesting project is UBports.

https://ubports.com/

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