Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal • Hacker News Board

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#121

Post by beebeepka » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #114

sixty4bit wrote: post #76

This is nice and all, but what I am waiting for is the phone to power my desktop setup. I walk up, drop the phone into a dock, and my three 27" monitors all wake up with the desktop exactly as I left it. To get there I think the GPU will have to be embedded in the monitors, and some interesting operating system hoops will have to be jumped through. Do cords have enough bandwidth now to support this? I honestly don't…

The Steam Deck promises this, and it's a big reason why I reserved one. I think this could be integrated nicely into my daily web-centric workflow.

Steam Deck is nice and I want one even though I have no need for one, but it's not exactly a phone. It's got fans I think. Give it another 10 years

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#122

Post by zepto » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #89

chronogram wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know why you’d want that. The place where I have my big monitor is where I also have the space for a computer that has enough room to be always fast and quiet for my tasks that I can leave running things, while my phone is something that I need for communication which can help with information/scheduling and that I would like to have with me at all times. Having all my work on my phone would make me leave tha…

> The place where I have my big monitor is where I also have the space for a computer If you have a single device for everything, you do not need syncing and backups are needed only for one device.

A single device for everything is a single point of failure for everything.

One of the great things about having various synced devices is that if one fails or is misplaced, stolen etc., the others are instantly available.

No single device solution can replicate this real world benefit.

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#123

Post by desktopninja » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

I tasted this with the Display Dock for Lumia phone. My initial setup was USB/Wifi KB + miracast + android phone. And it worked just as well. Overseas phones seem to have more capabilities than what we get stateside.

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#124

Post by wjnc » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

chronogram wrote: post #83

sixty4bit wrote: post #76

This is nice and all, but what I am waiting for is the phone to power my desktop setup. I walk up, drop the phone into a dock, and my three 27" monitors all wake up with the desktop exactly as I left it. To get there I think the GPU will have to be embedded in the monitors, and some interesting operating system hoops will have to be jumped through. Do cords have enough bandwidth now to support this? I honestly don't…

I don’t know why you’d want that. The place where I have my big monitor is where I also have the space for a computer that has enough room to be always fast and quiet for my tasks that I can leave running things, while my phone is something that I need for communication which can help with information/scheduling and that I would like to have with me at all times. Having all my work on my phone would make me leave tha…

It’s a 400W+ machine blazing under my desk, with relatively low performance per watt and per unit of cost and high depreciation per hour of usage. With 6 ms latency to my major IX and the stability and backup professionalism cloud providers can offer I’d be all in for online desktop. Perhaps I’d invest in a bit more beefy Synology as an internet-down local machine, but my phone or iPad could offer that functionality as well. Going from full machines to terminal-screens would also save my household of 5 many kgs of electronics. That times a few hundred million households sure adds up.

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#125

Post by deergomoo » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #111

sixty4bit wrote: post #76

This is nice and all, but what I am waiting for is the phone to power my desktop setup. I walk up, drop the phone into a dock, and my three 27" monitors all wake up with the desktop exactly as I left it. To get there I think the GPU will have to be embedded in the monitors, and some interesting operating system hoops will have to be jumped through. Do cords have enough bandwidth now to support this? I honestly don't…

> To get there I think the GPU will have to be embedded in the monitors Rumors say Apple is working on a monitor with an A13 chip embedded in it for something like this kind of usage.

I just wish they’d make a monitor that doesn’t cost $5000. It’s basically impossible to find a 27”+ monitor that works optimally with a Mac because they’re all 4K, and the way macOS handles scaling means you have to scale by a non-integer factor.

Just give me the 5K iMac panel in a basic shell, that’s all I need.

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#126

Post by diffeomorphism » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #10

paraknight wrote: post #5

I'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…

Nope, not even. 1) This would be tolerable with some PinePhone successor, but proprietary solutions like Samsung DEX are conducive to lock-in, more difficult for developers to target, and tend to go unsupported after a few years. 2) Phones have to become more durable. I expect my primary computing device to last half a decade. My phone's USB-C port is flaky after just over 2 years of charging it and carrying it aroun…

Concerning 2) magnetic usb-c connectors are nice and wireless is an option, e.g. see the Lenovo wigig dock for an implementation.

Concerning 3) I think things are moving in the other direction. With immutable base OS and data seamlessy backed up (encrypted, of course) switching to a new device should be fairly frustration free.

For 4) I think we will see more and more of a mixture. For instance better integration of cloud storage, things like game streaming, more video streaming etc. . So not thin client, but not fully featured offline either.

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#127

Post by diffeomorphism » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

drvdevd wrote: post #9

The 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.

I don't see why this is an issue. If you connect by usb-c that also charges. If you want it wirelessly you can still lie it down on an inductive charging pad, right? Or would that interfere with the connection?

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#128

Post by musingsole » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

sixty4bit wrote: post #76

This is nice and all, but what I am waiting for is the phone to power my desktop setup. I walk up, drop the phone into a dock, and my three 27" monitors all wake up with the desktop exactly as I left it. To get there I think the GPU will have to be embedded in the monitors, and some interesting operating system hoops will have to be jumped through. Do cords have enough bandwidth now to support this? I honestly don't…

It's my hope the future will be more decentralized than that. Perhaps a smartphone is a portal to a dashboard coordinating a fleet of machines -- some in the cloud, some in the community, and some under your personal control in your property.

A high definition display (perhaps a projector or OLED screen) embeds a streaming device of which there are already plenty on the market. A computer with integrated game controller and advanced graphics sits charging on a dock, ready to pair and cast it's intensively, locally rendered graphics to a screen of the user's choosing. A room off to the side contains 5 or more smartscreens, ready to accept display from a personalized repository of cloud containers.

A touch-tablet hangs from a swivel arm under the cabinets above the kitchen stove, a swipe away from picking up a webpage from a smartphone or another on-network device. A UV light is embedded under the cabinet to help sanitize the tablet after cooking.

I think the intelligence gets decentralized behind APIs -- some hosted locally, some hosted through the internet. The user interfaces become more focused on context. You have various levels and kinds of input and edge intelligence based on the specific goal, all backed up by some handful of cloud applications. But a fleet like this becomes too hard to manage for an individual. So the specific deployments, allocations and budgeting is managed by an AI system that you set "moods" for through a smartphone app with some -- but limited -- advanced, specific settings available through a hamburger menu.

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#129

Post by tluyben2 » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #120

rambambram wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks indeed for the review! I came across these devices once, and I always wondered if it was more gadget-like, or really useful. Have you tried running Ubuntu MATE on it?

On which, the Cosmo or the MicroPC? I was never brave enough to tinker with GNU/Linux on the Cosmo while it was my daily driver. I'm pretty sure that using the device that way comes with some pretty sever compromises. On the Micro PC, I run Void Linux with KDE Plasma. I didn't do anything special, everything's mainline, so I'm sure at a technical level Ubuntu MATE would work perfectly well. The only interface tweaks…

Did you try other configurations? Like i3wm? I get over 15 hours with some tweaking with a modern Ubuntu and i3wm + optimizations.

Re: Smart Phone, Dumb Terminal

#130

Post by neolog » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #122

fsflover wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The place where I have my big monitor is where I also have the space for a computer If you have a single device for everything, you do not need syncing and backups are needed only for one device.

A single device for everything is a single point of failure for everything . One of the great things about having various synced devices is that if one fails or is misplaced, stolen etc., the others are instantly available. No single device solution can replicate this real world benefit.

Well, you can get two of them