this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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I had this dream in 2010 (not literally a dream, just a notion) that someday, we'd replace desktops with phones... like, sit down at a desk, attach it to a dock, it would connect to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and you could use it like a desktop PC. I suppose we could already do that, other than that the software would still be phone apps not made to be used with a mouse or for the most part a landscape screen.
You're describing Samsung Dex
Doesn't count until apple makes up a word for it.
Oh iSee.
AirDesk.
Or the HP Elite X3.
RIP Windows Phone.
Windows phones used to be good as it was almost literally a mobile version of windows. Then they switched to the new UI, and while the contact combining and home screen were sweet, they ditched the rest of what made it "windows".
There was a motorola phone meant to do that a long while back too. I assume other manufacturers have made one... I'll check that out!
Oh, I see it's a software system and not a specific device. That's cool. Well damn, I even had a Galaxy S9 and didn't know about that.
Look into cell phone laptop shells . Its what it sounds like. You plug your phone into it and your phone "becomes" the laptop. That was a few years ago ,I imagine there's better options now
Aah, the good old Motorola Atrix.
One of the earliest Laptop/phone combo devices I remember releasing.
Nice, that's the one I was thinking of!
I had high hopes for Dex when it was first announced and I was on android for my phone, but dragging around a monitor was more work than just bringing my laptop. I got a 12.9" iPad a couple years ago as a portable library, then last year thought I might replace my (Windows) laptop by adding a keyboard and mouse to the iPad so I wouldn't have to take both into the field for minor work. I've also got a Samsung S7 so I tested it out as well. The capability/usability gap between the full desktop version of Word and the mobile versions made me give up. Understand I have a dozen templates, from simple to complex, in Word, and around 20 calculation or tracking Excel sheets - so transitioning to Pages/Docs and Sheets/Numbers would cost me about $20k in productivity time. And I still wouldn't have my CAD, finite element analysis, or industry-specific utilities with me.
My current setup is Fold4 with BT keyboard and mouse. This is what I use instead of laptop for work when traveling. It's not perfect but more capable than expected. DeX is surprisingly usable but mobile applications lack in some areas. Luckily most of my work is around code so getting Termux solves most of the issues. S7 Galaxy Tab should have pretty capable DeX implementation which doesn't require external screen to work. For me just foldable screen is good enough for writing code.
It really worked well for my use case during the pandemic. I was in a research lab and while I did most of my computational work from home, when I had experiments to do I would go in, and used dex to update my data spreadsheets and collect imaging, upload to our computational cluster and be able to run some basic stuff on that through an ssh terminal. I was just using Google sheets for my basic data entry. And I had a dock already set up there for my laptop, which had attached ethernet, a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. So I could just plug my phone into the USB c and have an instant solution that worked just like a computer and connected to the secure network over ethernet (which was required for the fastest upload to the cluster).
The biggest limitations was only being able to have 5 windows open at once, but for the limited tasks I needed to do, it worked well enough.
I don't think we'll see it for a few years, but I feel like Apple has laid out their plans for this when they announced the VisionPro. It runs iPhone and iPad apps in Stage Manager. So does the iPad Pro. And I can definitely see that it's a possibility for the phones in the future.
Now the chips in the phones aren't M-series, so it might be a while until we've got the horsepower, and I'm sure there's some developer-changes necessary as well, but it doesn't seem out of the question.
The A17 Pro is pretty close to the M1 in benchmarks, and that's more than enough for most users. Presumably it'd still be iOS, so existing knowledge and experience would apply, they're just need to design and test their UIs for larger landscape screens, which they may already be doing for iPads.
Could it handle doing that all day? That would so cool, but aren't there thermal limitations?
Probably not, for reasons you stated. But for a typical workload I doubt that would even matter. If you would have otherwise considered a MacBook air, this would still probably be a sufficient replacement.
I have been using this for actual years at this point (S21 Ultra)
i have a feeling stage manager support with be the flagship iPhone 16 pro (ultra?) feature
I do this with my iPad a lot, though obviously not a full “desktop experience.” It’s close enough for normal stuff.
I wonder how much different ios is versus iPadOS in terms of allowing for something like stage manager to work on the phone if it’s plugged in. I imagine it may be non trivial right now. But obviously they could always make changes.
I had a phone in 2011 called the Motorola Atrix 4G that did this. It didn't do this particularly well, but it had a dock with HDMI and USB ports and such. There was also a laptop-shaped dock that had a built-in monitor, keyboard, and trackpad.
I once torrented a movie on the phone, plugged it into the dock, and watched it on the TV. I controlled it with a Bluetooth mouse. It worked fine.