Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop • Hacker News Board

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#41

Post by lostgame » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 11:53 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #39

lostgame wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK video decoding generally has its own chip, at least for supported codecs, separate from the GPU.

Can those things be exploited for other purposes?

I’m not sure, that’s a great question. Practically, I’m not sure how that could be of use but I have seen some amazing things come out of the several processors in, for instance, SEGA Saturn homebrew, with chipsets certainly making innovative unintended uses, or at least insanely creative use.

Here’s an example of what an H.264 decoder chip would be like:

https://www.digikey.ca/en/product-highlight/s/system-on-chip...

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#42

Post by Spooky23 » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 12:11 AM UTC

mekkkkkk wrote: post #27

Why has cheap KVM-consoles for phones never taken off? It seems like a great way to get a portable/inexpensive laptop experience. Judging by the relative success of Chromebooks, it would appear to be a ripe segment. And the performance of any mid to high tier phone is more than enough for the casual laptop user. As mentioned in the article: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

It does in some industries. VDI is a thing, and ChromeOS is a really cool way to deliver it.

Chrome offers some really interesting use cases in enterprise now, and the pricing is competitive with traditional thin clients. You can still get Wyse devices for less money at scale.

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#43

Post by Spooky23 » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 12:13 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #17

lostmsu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video decoding is usually implemented in hardware, so very efficient.

Sure, GPU. But do phones have gaming-level GPU? So what do phones normally do with their CPU?

No, they have dedicated chips or instructions for H264/265. In general, the advantage of faster phones is that they are idle a lot more.

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#44

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 12:17 AM UTC

riquito wrote: post #33

Microsoft tried with Continuum https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/continuum but Windows Phones didn't take off

They were slowly taking off in Europe, and were already around 10% when they decided to kill them.

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#45

Post by mdturnerphys » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 12:33 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #11

This is exactly what I've wanted phones to become for years. It honestly amazes / pisses me off that I can't buy something like this off the shelf. Maybe I'll bite the bullet and piss away a few hours on rom flashing to get /e/ on my phone.

Windows 10 phones did this. I had a small docking station for my Lumia 950 that had USB ports and a display port. It worked pretty well.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee and the phone and docking station were both given to me.)

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#46

Post by solarengineer » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 12:57 AM UTC

Of related interest: http://nexdock.com/

Connect your USB-C phones which support Desktop Mode, and the apps in them can be used in the laptop shell.

They depend upon phones that short this via Android Q. They are tracking other projects such as OXI, MaruOS, and Librem to ensure compatibility.

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#47

Post by Tilian » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 1:02 AM UTC

Canonical tried something similar with Ubuntu Touch, which was, sadly, killed off due to low market interest. With ever more capable phone hardware I'm quite surprised we aren't seeing more progress in OS convergence.

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#48

Post by mirimir » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 1:17 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #30

mirimir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a good reason not to buy junk like that.

Many phones are somewhat harder to unlock than Samsung models. The Knox efuse is an annoyance, but most of that is security theater anyway. It doesn't gate many useful features that a Lineage user would care about.

OK, then.

It still seems offensive that there's no way to reset it.

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#49

Post by mirimir » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 1:20 AM UTC

craftinator wrote: post #40

mirimir wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can those things be exploited for other purposes?

Sure. I've used the H264 encoder/decoder in lossless mode on the raspi3 compress large amounts of sensor data. You just need to format the data into image frames. It worked very well, and ended up being bottlenecked by the io bandwidth of the system.

Does raspi3 have real gigabit Ethernet?

Re: Using an /e/ phone as a desktop or laptop

#50

Post by hyperpallium » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 1:39 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #11

This is exactly what I've wanted phones to become for years. It honestly amazes / pisses me off that I can't buy something like this off the shelf. Maybe I'll bite the bullet and piss away a few hours on rom flashing to get /e/ on my phone.

I guess you're aware of http://termux.com?

It's effectively a linux distribution for android (with a large repository of packages), that uses the existing android kernel. So no rooting required, and has the power efficiency of android.