10 ms·

I've seen these before and I always loved the idea of "convergence" even though its never been successful. I remember in at least 2013 when the Ubuntu Edge had

I've seen these before and I always loved the idea of "convergence" even though its never been successful. I remember in at least 2013 when the Ubuntu Edge had a convergence feature that would blow your phone up into a (very slow) desktop PC over DisplayPort that you would then control via the phone touch screen [1]. I suspect the reason that mobile convergence hasn't been successful is that people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood you are in. My phone is for social stuff, my tablet is for entertainment stuff and my laptop is for work stuff. The thought of cramming all of those head-spaces into one device feels stressful, like putting all my eggs into one basket. I'm always very happy when I hear about updates to DeX or new convergence docks though 1:https://youtu.be/bk9-v8Sl4yU https://youtu.be/bk9-v8Sl4yU

Bluestein 2y ago
> that people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood you are in Sounds reasonable.- PS. As a counterpoint to that, many will I am sure remember how one PC *was* everything and one did everything on it. One per household, even ...
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Haha. * counts 4 in the living room, about 10 servers in the lab, probably 20 computers in total in my single person home not including raspberry pis, mobiles or tablets :)
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    Insane.- (Yet, I am sure, not atypical nowadays - if a bit above the mean ...)
Narhem 2y ago
Super book was another example of these type of devices which never got to market. Had the chance to play with the foldable devices and thought they are actually pretty great. I think these type of formats are decent for travelers.
wkat4242 2y ago
Meh, it works fine for me. You can also use work profile (island app) to segment your phone a bit further. I really love DeX and I just spent a whole week working with it as my primary computing device. I don't have a mobile dock though. The reason being that they're not an awful lot cheaper or lighter than a real laptop so what's the point.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > they're not an awful lot cheaper or lighter than a real laptop so what's the point. True. Probably one of the biggest obstacles to adoption. Their price point pretty much overlaps with an entry-level laptop.-
obscurette 2y ago
I see a an increasing number of people around me using phone only for stuff they absolutely need to carry around – payment/banking, loyalty cards, 2FA, maps. Maybe also some pure messaging app, some puzzle game, but that's it. No any social media, news, work etc.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Two (diverging, yet simultaneous) tendencies: "The phone as a glorified wallet" and "The phone as your life". Both at play ...
- MikeTheGreat 2y ago
  Now that you mention it, that's a good way to think about it. Of all the things on my phone, the only thing I feel like I absolutely can't live without (in my phone) is my OneBusAway app that tells me when my next bus is coming. Also: /shameless-plug-for-free-and-awesome-app :)
maxglute 2y ago
It wouldn't be hard to trigger DEX/desktop enviroment to load a different profile. I feel like most hardware companies don't want to eat away at different segments.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  (Along those lines, some phones have a "second" or "secret" profile/mode that is accessible through a different PIN code at the lockscreen, for example ...)
xattt 2y ago
I've got a Samsung Android phone that I tried with a DisplayLink dock for browsing. It was able to use the Ethernet OOTB, but browsing was PAINFUL. The responsiveness is/was not there.
gumby 2y ago
A scooter, motorcycle, car, and delivery van all serve different purposes, though there is a little crossover between each stage. The same is true about these devices: yes, in a pinch you can grab that document and search for something but really when editing it you want not just a keyboard and larger display, but a bit more horsepower and different apps. So I use to think a fancy dock like this would be good, but their continued failure has taught me a lot.
- bluGill 2y ago
  A basic phone blows away the early computers. 40mhz one core cpus (spark, mips, 80486...) used to do a lot of work and be fast. What has changed is bloat.
  - input_sh 2y ago
    No, what changed is our expectation of what such a device should be capable of doing. You're not gonna load a 1080p YouTube video on 400 MHz.
    - ozim 2y ago
      Some would say 1080p is bloat when you can watch videos perfectly fine in lower resolution ;)
      - skeledrew 2y ago
        I remember when I got a 1080p monitor and watched some slightly old content (~480p) on it. The experience was very lackluster. Now I'm getting a similar feeling with a recently-bought 4k-capable laptop, and watching 720p content that looked perfectly fine on the 1080p monitor. I don't even want to think about the 480p archives. Almost makes me not want to upgrade devices.
        Bluestein 2y ago
        (Can totally sée some AI-based solutions performing some heavy "interpolation" to "upsample" content in realtime ...)
RachelF 2y ago
Yes, Samsung has had their "Dex" which looks just like NexDock. Modern Motorola phones have a similar feature. VNC has been around for a long time. It just seems like something people don't want to use. I'm not sure why, though?
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Price point might be an issue ...
  - antifa 2y ago
    You can get an external monitor and seperate keyboard for about $100. The issue for me at least, is that I don't want to to put android apps on a monitor, I want a real Linux desktop experience when I plug my phone into a monitor.
maccard 2y ago
There was a meme a while back - my most millennial trait is that big purchases must happen on a big screen”. My brother is a zoomer and the only computing device in his house is his mobile phone and work laptop. He does absolutely everything on his phone. I think we’re moving away from separated devices, honestly
- gwervc 2y ago
  I feel like it highly depends on what people are doing with a device: if there're only a consumer (of digital content or physical product), only owning and using a smartphone is fine. However for creating things (writing a PhD thesis, making a game, editing horizontal video) a PC is still required.
  - maccard 2y ago
    If we want to quantify every exception sure. We've moved away from mainframe devices but that doesn't mean none exist. We've moved away from Windows XP but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
lmm 2y ago
> I suspect the reason that mobile convergence hasn't been successful is that people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood you are in. My phone is for social stuff, my tablet is for entertainment stuff and my laptop is for work stuff. Nah, I used to think the same thing about desktop vs laptop but turns out once laptops got good enough to be a true desktop replacement it was much better to just have one device. Phones aren't there yet, even if the raw processor speed numbers suggest they should be.
kristopolous 2y ago
Not really. Let's look at Bell's Law from 1972 to understand this: "Roughly every decade a new, lower priced computer class forms based on a new programming platform, network, and interface resulting in new usage and a new industry." So we can say, generally, mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, microcomputers, laptops, smart phones, and now wearables (watches, rings, wallets, bracelets, glasses, etc) Next we'll have something I'll call the Mckenzie corollary (that's me I guess): "Roughly a decade or two after introduction, the lower price computer class will subsume the upper price computing class." So the minicomputers took on mainframe tasks. The workstations took on the minicomputer tasks. The microcomputers took on the workstation tasks. Laptops took on the micros. All this happened with a significant lag time. And now, the smartphones are vying for the laptops. These are superstructural transformations and take years because a bunch of new things need to be invented, developed, mastered and widely deployed for it to happen. We are roughly in the wearables and phones-become-laptops epoch.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Let's look at The Poverty of Historicism from 1944 to understand why you can't predict societal change with laws. "[The evolution of] human society, is a unique historical process ... Its description, however, is not a law, but only a singular historical statement."
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    Karl Popper was being a logician about it. People aren't claiming supernatural powers with market trend analysis like some Helena Blavatsky of electronics or that these "laws" hold like thermodynamics. If it's been good for 60 years so that might continue or maybe something unexpected will happen. Popper's piecemeal alternative predicts nothing. The market trend analysis is at least accurate > 0% of the time. It's a non-scientific process with unquantifiable accuracy but it is empirically non-zero. For instance, Geofferey Moore's adoption curves proposed in 1991 are widely found but, every now and then, the galloping animal is a zebra. This doesn't mean you shouldn't plan for horses. Presuming a decade or two from now people will connect their wearables powered by kinetic charging to foldable e-paper with a transparent solar panel layer is just a bet. Maybe something radical will happen instead: The public payphone will come back as a public computer that people will biometrically log into after shunning personal electronics as toxic spy machines ruining society. Eh, probably not, but maybe.
Lerc 2y ago
I always liked the idea that rather than your phone being the powerhouse for a laptop or desktop environment that it instead be a receptacle for data. If only there were a standardized protocol enabling browsers (could be any smart terminal protocol, but browsers exist now, and would mostly work) to securely connect to nearby devices, maybe even require a physical connection if you want extra safety. Then instead of a specific dock you could use just about any capable laptop or desktop as an environment. I don't think it can be done at the moment without an on-internet intermediary. A local discovery and connection system that the terminal(browser) could be aware of. Maybe this could be shoehorned into existing systems like Bluetooth. You could get an absurd usb connection working if the phone appeared as both a file store as well as a keyboard that types in the commands to launch itself. I see no potential pitfalls with that approach.
- fragmede 2y ago
  avahi/bonjour for discovery, vnc served up over http for UI. Intel proposed a box with Ethernet over USB for this a long time ago but it never caught on.
treflop 2y ago
For me, it’s that I don’t have a monitor on hand to plug my phone into. And if I’m going to plan to bring a monitor, shit, I’ll just bring my laptop anyway.
vasco 2y ago
Convergence happened already, I'm logged into the same apps from any device and have access to mostly the same files and functionality through the cloud.
type0 2y ago
the real convergence will happen eventually, when Google merges Android with ChromeOS and we will get the worst of both worlds
- diffeomorphism 2y ago
  Luckily, it will include FSL-Fuchsia Subsystem for Linux. Enabling it will block Netflix and YouTube though.
DaoVeles 2y ago
The last generation of Windows Phone had convergence that provided a version of this. Allowed you to run UWP apps on a Windows desktop. But like many things in the Windows phone universe, it was simultaneously 10 years ahead and 10 years behind. I miss the thing all the time.
- coredog64 2y ago
  There was also a dock for your Windows Phone that granted a desktop UI and allowed for light MS Office usage. Used it a couple of times in a pinch.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > was simultaneously 10 years ahead and 10 years behind. This is a great way to put it. "Recipes" were ahead of their time, but half-baked ...
zozbot234 2y ago
Convergence should work fine from modern desktop Linux: you should be able to attach a tiny, phone-sized screen to any SBC or mini-PC and run a mobile-focused experience (such as Phosh or Gnome-Mobile) and it should just work. Attach a bigger external monitor and apps should just scale up seamlessly. This will get quite interesting with the newer device form factor of handheld consoles running x86-64 hardware, since they too have a roughly phone-sized screen that usually supports touch input, as well as analog sticks that might be readily usable for pointer movement or scrolling, and lots of physical buttons that might be usable for gestures or chorded input.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Convergence should work fine from modern desktop Linux: you should be able to attach a tiny, phone-sized screen to any SBC or mini-PC and run a mobile-focused experience (such as Phosh or Gnome-Mobile) and it should just work. Attach a bigger external monitor and apps should just scale up seamlessly. My Pinephone Pro runs Plasma Mobile and yeah you can just plug it in to a USB-C dock with HDMI out and a mouse+keyboard plugged in and it scales up into a slightly odd desktop:)
weitendorf 2y ago
> people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood Agree this is a big factor, but with peripherals to extend your smartphone into a laptop you do still have to own multiple “devices” (discrete units of physical hardware). If you’re already gonna have to lug around a dongle/adapter and one or more pieces of hardware (mouse, keyboard, screen) to get the laptop experience, you might as well just lug around an entire laptop. Also, “cloud” software (not just things like Google docs, but the widespread use of web applications allowing you to log in to some app from anywhere) has solved a lot of the biggest problems in this space. You can easily access all the important things on your phone from a laptop, unless you go out of your way to not upload something somewhere. So being able to convert a smartphone into a laptop is mostly about saving money on hardware (which may not be that much. Do you pay $200 for peripherals to get an underpowered laptop powered by a phone, or a mid-like laptop?) or addressing a very niche UX need.

Bluestein 2y ago

> that people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood you are in Sounds reasonable.- PS. As a counterpoint to that, many will I am sure remember how one PC *was* everything and one did everything on it. One per household, even ...

wkat4242 2y ago
Haha. * counts 4 in the living room, about 10 servers in the lab, probably 20 computers in total in my single person home not including raspberry pis, mobiles or tablets :)
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Insane.- (Yet, I am sure, not atypical nowadays - if a bit above the mean ...)

Narhem 2y ago

Super book was another example of these type of devices which never got to market. Had the chance to play with the foldable devices and thought they are actually pretty great. I think these type of formats are decent for travelers.

wkat4242 2y ago

Meh, it works fine for me. You can also use work profile (island app) to segment your phone a bit further. I really love DeX and I just spent a whole week working with it as my primary computing device. I don't have a mobile dock though. The reason being that they're not an awful lot cheaper or lighter than a real laptop so what's the point.

Bluestein 2y ago
> they're not an awful lot cheaper or lighter than a real laptop so what's the point. True. Probably one of the biggest obstacles to adoption. Their price point pretty much overlaps with an entry-level laptop.-

obscurette 2y ago

I see a an increasing number of people around me using phone only for stuff they absolutely need to carry around – payment/banking, loyalty cards, 2FA, maps. Maybe also some pure messaging app, some puzzle game, but that's it. No any social media, news, work etc.

Bluestein 2y ago
Two (diverging, yet simultaneous) tendencies: "The phone as a glorified wallet" and "The phone as your life". Both at play ...
MikeTheGreat 2y ago
Now that you mention it, that's a good way to think about it. Of all the things on my phone, the only thing I feel like I absolutely can't live without (in my phone) is my OneBusAway app that tells me when my next bus is coming. Also: /shameless-plug-for-free-and-awesome-app :)

maxglute 2y ago

It wouldn't be hard to trigger DEX/desktop enviroment to load a different profile. I feel like most hardware companies don't want to eat away at different segments.

Bluestein 2y ago
(Along those lines, some phones have a "second" or "secret" profile/mode that is accessible through a different PIN code at the lockscreen, for example ...)

xattt 2y ago

I've got a Samsung Android phone that I tried with a DisplayLink dock for browsing. It was able to use the Ethernet OOTB, but browsing was PAINFUL. The responsiveness is/was not there.

gumby 2y ago

A scooter, motorcycle, car, and delivery van all serve different purposes, though there is a little crossover between each stage. The same is true about these devices: yes, in a pinch you can grab that document and search for something but really when editing it you want not just a keyboard and larger display, but a bit more horsepower and different apps. So I use to think a fancy dock like this would be good, but their continued failure has taught me a lot.

bluGill 2y ago
A basic phone blows away the early computers. 40mhz one core cpus (spark, mips, 80486...) used to do a lot of work and be fast. What has changed is bloat.
- input_sh 2y ago
  No, what changed is our expectation of what such a device should be capable of doing. You're not gonna load a 1080p YouTube video on 400 MHz.
  - ozim 2y ago
    Some would say 1080p is bloat when you can watch videos perfectly fine in lower resolution ;)
    - skeledrew 2y ago
      I remember when I got a 1080p monitor and watched some slightly old content (~480p) on it. The experience was very lackluster. Now I'm getting a similar feeling with a recently-bought 4k-capable laptop, and watching 720p content that looked perfectly fine on the 1080p monitor. I don't even want to think about the 480p archives. Almost makes me not want to upgrade devices.
      - Bluestein 2y ago
        (Can totally sée some AI-based solutions performing some heavy "interpolation" to "upsample" content in realtime ...)

RachelF 2y ago

Yes, Samsung has had their "Dex" which looks just like NexDock. Modern Motorola phones have a similar feature. VNC has been around for a long time. It just seems like something people don't want to use. I'm not sure why, though?

Bluestein 2y ago
Price point might be an issue ...
- antifa 2y ago
  You can get an external monitor and seperate keyboard for about $100. The issue for me at least, is that I don't want to to put android apps on a monitor, I want a real Linux desktop experience when I plug my phone into a monitor.

maccard 2y ago

There was a meme a while back - my most millennial trait is that big purchases must happen on a big screen”. My brother is a zoomer and the only computing device in his house is his mobile phone and work laptop. He does absolutely everything on his phone. I think we’re moving away from separated devices, honestly

gwervc 2y ago
I feel like it highly depends on what people are doing with a device: if there're only a consumer (of digital content or physical product), only owning and using a smartphone is fine. However for creating things (writing a PhD thesis, making a game, editing horizontal video) a PC is still required.
- maccard 2y ago
  If we want to quantify every exception sure. We've moved away from mainframe devices but that doesn't mean none exist. We've moved away from Windows XP but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.

lmm 2y ago

> I suspect the reason that mobile convergence hasn't been successful is that people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood you are in. My phone is for social stuff, my tablet is for entertainment stuff and my laptop is for work stuff. Nah, I used to think the same thing about desktop vs laptop but turns out once laptops got good enough to be a true desktop replacement it was much better to just have one device. Phones aren't there yet, even if the raw processor speed numbers suggest they should be.

kristopolous 2y ago

Not really. Let's look at Bell's Law from 1972 to understand this: "Roughly every decade a new, lower priced computer class forms based on a new programming platform, network, and interface resulting in new usage and a new industry." So we can say, generally, mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, microcomputers, laptops, smart phones, and now wearables (watches, rings, wallets, bracelets, glasses, etc) Next we'll have something I'll call the Mckenzie corollary (that's me I guess): "Roughly a decade or two after introduction, the lower price computer class will subsume the upper price computing class." So the minicomputers took on mainframe tasks. The workstations took on the minicomputer tasks. The microcomputers took on the workstation tasks. Laptops took on the micros. All this happened with a significant lag time. And now, the smartphones are vying for the laptops. These are superstructural transformations and take years because a bunch of new things need to be invented, developed, mastered and widely deployed for it to happen. We are roughly in the wearables and phones-become-laptops epoch.

card_zero 2y ago
Let's look at The Poverty of Historicism from 1944 to understand why you can't predict societal change with laws. "[The evolution of] human society, is a unique historical process ... Its description, however, is not a law, but only a singular historical statement."
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Karl Popper was being a logician about it. People aren't claiming supernatural powers with market trend analysis like some Helena Blavatsky of electronics or that these "laws" hold like thermodynamics. If it's been good for 60 years so that might continue or maybe something unexpected will happen. Popper's piecemeal alternative predicts nothing. The market trend analysis is at least accurate > 0% of the time. It's a non-scientific process with unquantifiable accuracy but it is empirically non-zero. For instance, Geofferey Moore's adoption curves proposed in 1991 are widely found but, every now and then, the galloping animal is a zebra. This doesn't mean you shouldn't plan for horses. Presuming a decade or two from now people will connect their wearables powered by kinetic charging to foldable e-paper with a transparent solar panel layer is just a bet. Maybe something radical will happen instead: The public payphone will come back as a public computer that people will biometrically log into after shunning personal electronics as toxic spy machines ruining society. Eh, probably not, but maybe.

Lerc 2y ago

I always liked the idea that rather than your phone being the powerhouse for a laptop or desktop environment that it instead be a receptacle for data. If only there were a standardized protocol enabling browsers (could be any smart terminal protocol, but browsers exist now, and would mostly work) to securely connect to nearby devices, maybe even require a physical connection if you want extra safety. Then instead of a specific dock you could use just about any capable laptop or desktop as an environment. I don't think it can be done at the moment without an on-internet intermediary. A local discovery and connection system that the terminal(browser) could be aware of. Maybe this could be shoehorned into existing systems like Bluetooth. You could get an absurd usb connection working if the phone appeared as both a file store as well as a keyboard that types in the commands to launch itself. I see no potential pitfalls with that approach.

fragmede 2y ago
avahi/bonjour for discovery, vnc served up over http for UI. Intel proposed a box with Ethernet over USB for this a long time ago but it never caught on.

treflop 2y ago

For me, it’s that I don’t have a monitor on hand to plug my phone into. And if I’m going to plan to bring a monitor, shit, I’ll just bring my laptop anyway.

vasco 2y ago

Convergence happened already, I'm logged into the same apps from any device and have access to mostly the same files and functionality through the cloud.

type0 2y ago

the real convergence will happen eventually, when Google merges Android with ChromeOS and we will get the worst of both worlds

diffeomorphism 2y ago
Luckily, it will include FSL-Fuchsia Subsystem for Linux. Enabling it will block Netflix and YouTube though.

DaoVeles 2y ago

The last generation of Windows Phone had convergence that provided a version of this. Allowed you to run UWP apps on a Windows desktop. But like many things in the Windows phone universe, it was simultaneously 10 years ahead and 10 years behind. I miss the thing all the time.

coredog64 2y ago
There was also a dock for your Windows Phone that granted a desktop UI and allowed for light MS Office usage. Used it a couple of times in a pinch.
Bluestein 2y ago
> was simultaneously 10 years ahead and 10 years behind. This is a great way to put it. "Recipes" were ahead of their time, but half-baked ...

zozbot234 2y ago

Convergence should work fine from modern desktop Linux: you should be able to attach a tiny, phone-sized screen to any SBC or mini-PC and run a mobile-focused experience (such as Phosh or Gnome-Mobile) and it should just work. Attach a bigger external monitor and apps should just scale up seamlessly. This will get quite interesting with the newer device form factor of handheld consoles running x86-64 hardware, since they too have a roughly phone-sized screen that usually supports touch input, as well as analog sticks that might be readily usable for pointer movement or scrolling, and lots of physical buttons that might be usable for gestures or chorded input.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Convergence should work fine from modern desktop Linux: you should be able to attach a tiny, phone-sized screen to any SBC or mini-PC and run a mobile-focused experience (such as Phosh or Gnome-Mobile) and it should just work. Attach a bigger external monitor and apps should just scale up seamlessly. My Pinephone Pro runs Plasma Mobile and yeah you can just plug it in to a USB-C dock with HDMI out and a mouse+keyboard plugged in and it scales up into a slightly odd desktop:)

weitendorf 2y ago

> people like owning multiple devices that fit the mood Agree this is a big factor, but with peripherals to extend your smartphone into a laptop you do still have to own multiple “devices” (discrete units of physical hardware). If you’re already gonna have to lug around a dongle/adapter and one or more pieces of hardware (mouse, keyboard, screen) to get the laptop experience, you might as well just lug around an entire laptop. Also, “cloud” software (not just things like Google docs, but the widespread use of web applications allowing you to log in to some app from anywhere) has solved a lot of the biggest problems in this space. You can easily access all the important things on your phone from a laptop, unless you go out of your way to not upload something somewhere. So being able to convert a smartphone into a laptop is mostly about saving money on hardware (which may not be that much. Do you pay $200 for peripherals to get an underpowered laptop powered by a phone, or a mid-like laptop?) or addressing a very niche UX need.