I didn't know about Obsidian - great tip. Installed it on macOS now and put the vault on my iCloud drive.
Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
11–20 of 157 posts
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#12I've been saying this for ages — the future setup is going to be phones as a singular device. When you get home, you'll dock it to be able to use your peripherals or extra monitors. Phones will become even more powerful, but even then anything heavy can be done in the cloud or at the network edge (with minimal latency thanks to 5g, see cloud gaming). OSs will become more convergent (Windows tried it, Huawei's doing i…
No I don't think so.
To be able to dock it you need a screen and keyboard (or a laptop-style "shell"). That means you need a device that takes just as much space as an independent device but can't be used unless you plug your phone to it. The only benefit is a slight lower cost - but then you need to make sure your phone is powerful enough so a cheap Android is out of the picture.
You've been saying this for ages, and manufacturers have been trying it for ages (Motorola Atrix, Samsung Dex...) but it doesn't catch on. So maybe you should reconsider your prediction!
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#13I've been saying this for ages — the future setup is going to be phones as a singular device. When you get home, you'll dock it to be able to use your peripherals or extra monitors. Phones will become even more powerful, but even then anything heavy can be done in the cloud or at the network edge (with minimal latency thanks to 5g, see cloud gaming). OSs will become more convergent (Windows tried it, Huawei's doing i…
I don't think it's going down that path. We're seeing people use phones more and more, and a lot of people don't seem to need a computer for most tasks. Why buy a dock plus keyboard plus mouse plus monitor when you can just use your phone?
People that do need a computer-like device probably won't have enough with a phone, and will need something more powerful than browser-based applications. Not to mention that a lot applications would be far more expensive if moved to the cloud (imagine a video editor where you not only pay for the software but also for the storage + computing power to the provider).
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#14I've been saying this for ages — the future setup is going to be phones as a singular device. When you get home, you'll dock it to be able to use your peripherals or extra monitors. Phones will become even more powerful, but even then anything heavy can be done in the cloud or at the network edge (with minimal latency thanks to 5g, see cloud gaming). OSs will become more convergent (Windows tried it, Huawei's doing i…
I'm not convinced. Not because it's technically unviable, but because I know that when companies like Google are involved it'd be far too restrictive for my taste. And as soon as you also want some local computing power (even if just for the situations it's offline) it's more expensive than hardware in a larger format like laptops - even more so when you need an upgrade, because phones can't be upgraded (or even repaired in some cases).
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#15The biggest problem with using your phone as a computer is not the screen size, or app availability or anything else you might commonly think of when considering arguing about this subject. In my opinion, today it is one and only one thing - the battery. I'm presently typing this comment on a desktop, because my phone is on the charger.
That's not consistent between phones. I have a low end Redmi 9T with a 6AH battery. It lasts 2 days of relatively heavy phone usage. I'm guessing it would last a whole day in a Termux shell.
Edit: if anything the real issue is thermals. I also have a high end phone with a Snapdragon 888. This thing has a faster CPU & GPU than my Intel desktop. However, it's only fast for seconds, until it gets thermally throttled.
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#16How feasible is to split/use compute power of multiple devices?
I would love to travel with a 15" ultraportble which is good for mail/browsing but will crawls while trying to play Flight Simulator. When I reach home, it seamlessly uses power of 599$ XBox compute centre to run it on 60FPS. When I reach office it compiles millions line of code using power of a 500 core office server.
Central server can be shared across devices so all devices of all members of family run at same speed/capability.
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#17I do this too! I have a Logitech MX Keys, and while trying to separate work and personal devices I put my phone on my laptop stand and with 1 button I can switch the MX Keys to the iPhone and Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp/Email/Termius away.
It works for more than I would have thought but I still really miss things like alt-tab, or in general the ability to navigate the UI with a keyboard. I mean why would the win/super key not open the multitasking overview? Currently it does nothing... Also, in Termius backspace works, but not delete, and page-up/down produces a ~. Little annoyances like that are everywhere.
I also bought an MX Anywhere 3 to go with it, but it didn't switch device with the MX Master switches, a missed opportunity imho. Moreover, at the time I was still on Android and for example in MineCraft the mouse pointer would still behave as a finger that drags stuff. (I eventually returned it because I also found it too flat for a mouse.)
So there is still much be made better but the basis is there. I guess the demand is still very low. But I bet it is also a chicken/egg story waiting to be resolved. I mean, iMovie on the iPhone is super powerful but on this screen and with touch... ugh.
Now just get me a monitor that also switches with my MX Master Keys switch keys to a larger view of my Phone and we've got ourselves a (partial because I love Linux, and yeah I was so looking forward to that Ubuntu Phone Convergence thing) laptop killer.
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#18I've been saying this for ages — the future setup is going to be phones as a singular device. When you get home, you'll dock it to be able to use your peripherals or extra monitors. Phones will become even more powerful, but even then anything heavy can be done in the cloud or at the network edge (with minimal latency thanks to 5g, see cloud gaming). OSs will become more convergent (Windows tried it, Huawei's doing i…
No I don't think so. To be able to dock it you need a screen and keyboard (or a laptop-style "shell"). That means you need a device that takes just as much space as an independent device but can't be used unless you plug your phone to it. The only benefit is a slight lower cost - but then you need to make sure your phone is powerful enough so a cheap Android is out of the picture. You've been saying this for ages, an…
Now that I'm using a Surface Book 2 as my primary computer, with a Surface Dock set up on my desk at home with screen/keyboard/speakers/etc., I'm more confident than ever that this future is coming eventually - but also confident that it will take a long time. Having a single device makes a surprisingly big difference from having two separate devices (home PC and travel laptop), but is also not worth sacrificing power for. The technical users who will become early adopters want a first-class home PC, so just as laptops only started to actually displace desktops once they had enough RAM etc. to match them, it'll be the same for phones, and they'll probably need to be x86-based phones for the sake of being able to run old programs.
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#19It was around 2000, after buying a Cassiopeia E-100 that I realized a keyboard makes any computer massively more usable. With that I bought a Psion 5MX, used it great success, and never considered a device without a physical keyboard again. Switched off to Nokia Communicators, then several Android Sliders. All worked great. I was always the guy in the conference room who could login to servers and look-up info, despite everyone else having phones, too.
A (pocket-sized) bluetooth keyboard sounds fine in theory, but it's a hassle to keep it charged and to carry around a bulky extra device you'll only use occasionally. So it'll get left at home, not there when you need it, and nearly worthless.
It's only now, with every US carrier switching to VoLTE-only that I'll soon have to retire the old Android sliders and find a new option. Everything seems an unfortunate compromise. The keyboard on the Blackberry Keyone/Key2 isn't great, missing critically important keys like arrows and OK, and without being rootable, you can't remap them to make it usable. The form factor is... awkward as well.
The Gemini PDA is likely to be my next stop. Unfortunately the form factor is kind of anti-phone, making it a poor choice to quickly look at your screen to check some info, or make phone calls, and only good when you really need to do a lot of typing.
Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal
#20There must be generation coming which has never used physical keyboard and do not ever want to. Even now, when my home automation needs some adjustment, it easier just to SSH to Emacs than to wake up, put some clothes on and go sitting by the screen. Especially with (global-set-key (kbd "å") 'hippie-expand) .