4 ms·

My guess the first to actually accomplish it will be something like making your android phone go into chromeos mode, since it already has a desktop userbase and

My guess the first to actually accomplish it will be something like making your android phone go into chromeos mode, since it already has a desktop userbase and would be the least amount of work to transform phones into supporting.

josteink 8y ago
Microsoft already did what OP asked several years ago with the Lumia phones. It was a total flop. Turns out cloud documents, storage and sync is good enough for people so they don’t feel the need to do all their computing on the same device. What OP wants is the ultimate portable computing-solution envisioned in a pre-cloud world. In a post-cloud world nobody is going to bother building it. Not even MS, with all their money could make it fly. Google has direct opposite interest in this. Apple wants you to buy more HW from them, not less. So who is going to deliver?
- toast0 8y ago
  Microsoft continuum was a flop for lots of reasons. Windows Mobile 10 was a flop; a niche feature on a niche os isn't going to sell phones, unless it was fabulous. The 'desktop' experience wasn't a real desktop, it was UWP, and if I recall correctly (??) didn't offer real multitasking with overlapping Windows and stuff. The amount of applications available for UWP is not very large, and the number that supported continuum features was a small fraction of that. If a desktop environment doesn't have applications, at least it should have a good browser. This had Edge, which might have a great rendering engine, but has a very slugish frontends and is awful to use. The clearly obvious next gen hardware for this (Intel x86 phone) was cancelled around the time of the release. None of that has anything to do with if the core concept is good or not. That there haven't been a lot of other attempts may be more damning. I think the opportunity is really that more and more people only have a phone, not a laptop or desktop; from time to time, they could use a larger computing environment -- is there a way to provide that, hook up to a tv/monitor and a keyboard + mouse and provide something useful.

josteink 8y ago

Microsoft already did what OP asked several years ago with the Lumia phones. It was a total flop. Turns out cloud documents, storage and sync is good enough for people so they don’t feel the need to do all their computing on the same device. What OP wants is the ultimate portable computing-solution envisioned in a pre-cloud world. In a post-cloud world nobody is going to bother building it. Not even MS, with all their money could make it fly. Google has direct opposite interest in this. Apple wants you to buy more HW from them, not less. So who is going to deliver?

toast0 8y ago
Microsoft continuum was a flop for lots of reasons. Windows Mobile 10 was a flop; a niche feature on a niche os isn't going to sell phones, unless it was fabulous. The 'desktop' experience wasn't a real desktop, it was UWP, and if I recall correctly (??) didn't offer real multitasking with overlapping Windows and stuff. The amount of applications available for UWP is not very large, and the number that supported continuum features was a small fraction of that. If a desktop environment doesn't have applications, at least it should have a good browser. This had Edge, which might have a great rendering engine, but has a very slugish frontends and is awful to use. The clearly obvious next gen hardware for this (Intel x86 phone) was cancelled around the time of the release. None of that has anything to do with if the core concept is good or not. That there haven't been a lot of other attempts may be more damning. I think the opportunity is really that more and more people only have a phone, not a laptop or desktop; from time to time, they could use a larger computing environment -- is there a way to provide that, hook up to a tv/monitor and a keyboard + mouse and provide something useful.