141–150 of 430 posts
With USB-C, surely we are at the point where we can plug our phones into a hub with a couple of monitors attached and get a proper desktop environment?
Plasma, GNOME, Phosh, it all just works.
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Maybe because the Atrix is from 13 years ago? They mentioned the Dex, a much more recent product with the same goals.
Which is precisely why I would expect it to be the start of such a discussion. The "use your smartphone as your PC" thing has been attempted again and again for, as you said, 13 years. Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want. That seems hugely important to such a conversation.
There's so many reasons why it's hard to say this is really unwanted. Atrix was a boutique not mainstream product so who knows what would have happened had it been generally usable.
At the time we didn't have anything like usb-c, so it was all special peripherals and displays. Now though a decent % of displays do have USB-c with power, and that's totally different starting conditions. Especially if that display also has a keyboard and mouse plugged in, which many do!
Commercial success requires paving of cow paths, needs a low impedance route to mass success. We haven't been in a spot where that's ever been remotely possible before.
Do I think Android on display is going to totally take over & dominate soon? No, no I don't. But mass availability and a world capable of supporting - making use of this capability has just arrived, and this really lets us get started with these ubiquitous & pervasive computing ideas that, so far/until now, have had to be bespoke offering.
Different but also similar, it feels like game streaming has some reasonable popularity too now, and it's another case of using interconnect across devices & peripherals that I think a lot of people have really grown into & deeply enjoy being able to do. It's still a small segment of people, relatively, but to me it speaks of adoption curves & how success is often extremely slow, how there are real fans who feel great joy & happiness, without the rest of the world being much tuned in or aware.
I find it highly annoying that these rather powerful handheld smartphone computers don't have decent port access for use with instrumentation, etc. A huge range of features comes to mind from Geiger counters, oscilloscopes, sound level measurement, light intensity, etc , etc. The potential to expand the smartphone capability is enormous yet no manufacturer has tackled it. Why not? Why aren't there multiple USB ports?…
> Why aren't there multiple USB ports? By now why don't all phones use USB-3? Why isn't there general purpose D/A and A/D ports/outputs for instrumentation? Why don't they include a GPIB-like bus to connect to things? Why can't we use the screen as an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of say 100MHz? Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0. There do exist phone…
But we are seeing some signs this might change. And insure hope it does, in a big way. A hub can be ok, but with the need to mix display out & peripherals and power, in fancy ways, USB3 really is a limited option. And alas USB4 fixes many of the constraints but is way too high end alas alas alas. Anyways here's an upcoming very cheap tablet with multiple ports, and reports are a lot more are coming. Given the marginal cost of ports, it's about frelling time! Do it! You won't ever have adoption if there's no (or almost no) option! https://www.techradar.com/pro/this-tablet-has-a-genius-featu...
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You are just thinking iPhone. There are many Android phones on the market that are woefully underpowered for anything beyond store demo mode.
Yeah, iPhones being throttled? Unheard of! /s https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517
Also, despite Android fanboys getting triggered, I never said that there are no good Android phones. There are. And the median Android phone is more powerful than an iPhone for the money (especially non-US models). The differentiator is that Apple doesn't ship iPhones that are too awful.
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"Because the population of people that would actually use that functionality rounds to approximately 0." How can you say that, where are your figures/stats/evidence? For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone. Clearly you don't work in test and measurement. Moreover, this article alone has raised the matter of additional features. Anyway, it's only a matter of ti…
> For starters I'm 1 person, so the market is not O. And I know of others, and I know I'm not alone Of all the people you interacted with in any way, shape or form this year, what percentage of those would benefit from this? It rounds to 0, assuming you’re not a shut-in
Does postmarketOS have something like Samsung Dex? It shouldn't be very resource intensive to run few TUI applications on external monitor.
When I was a teen, Symbian smartphones with a physical slide keyboards were all the rage, but too expensive for my budget. I was day dreaming of how cool that'd be to be able to ssh someplace from a phone via grps. I did it years later once (from an early android phone). Now I have an android phone that can do that easily (albeit without a physical keyboard), and yet I never do that day to day. Phones make poor compu…
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Single monitor is probably doable by the majority of phones on the market, but multi-monitor is another story. I’m not sure that most phone SoCs have the hardware to support more than one, which would mean that additional monitors would need to be driven via software ala DisplayLink which might make the phone get hot and negatively impact battery health. The other issue is demand. I suspect that the number of people…
I'd be somewhat interested. Single-monitor is good enough for most people for home computing stuff. And touch-screen interaction on a tiny screen sucks for anything like spreadsheets, composing documents, dealing with PDFs, or dense forms. I would probably come down to separate devices however, in the interests of security and continuity. A phone is much more likely to be lost or stolen than a computer on a desk at h…
Using only one device would mean a downgrade in my work setup - one screen less. Moreover, if I'm traveling and have to work somewhere on the fly, a laptop offers a decent keyboard and tolerable screen size by itself. And there is a variety of options on offer (larger screens, lighter laptop, more computing power), so I can pick the optimal one for me.
As such, I don't see a smartphone replacing my daily driver, nor my "planned to work while travelling" driver. Best-case scenario it'd a below-average compromise. But the laptop market offers enough choice that I can get a better compromise for less there.