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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?
by jmkni 2y ago
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?
- ddejohn 2y agoI can't remember what the project was called, but many years ago I remember seeing a concept for a Linux phone that also doubled as your desktop when plugged into a hub.
- abawany 2y agoPinephone used to be able to do that a few years ago when I tried.
- y33t 2y agoThis was an Ubuntu phone concept back around 2011/2012. Steam Deck can do it, but you have to manually switch to desktop mode.
- estebank 2y agoYou're probably thinking of https://www.cnet.com/reviews/motorola-laptop-dock-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/motorola-laptop-dock-review/ or https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/6/9464639/microsoft-windows-10-mobile-continuum-hands-on https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/6/9464639/microsoft-windows...
- ddejohn 2y agoNope, it was a Linux project.
- mkonecny 2y agoAll Samsung Galaxy phones have a built in desktop OS called Dex. I remember plugging my monitor usb-c cable to charge my phone and being blown away when a desktop UI appeared on the monitor
- mech422 2y agothat is pretty cool - wonder if it supports keyboard/mouse too ?
- totallywrong 2y agoIt does. And you can also use the phone screen as trackpad while in Dex mode. It's actually a pretty good desktop environment for Android.
- Tostino 2y agoIt does.
- kiicia 2y agoEvery iOS and android device supports mouse and keyboard at this point
- rchaud 2y agoDeX is very good, lot of fun to use with a lapdock. However, you need to check if the particular model of phone supports it. Usually it's the more expensive models, so Galaxy S, Galaxy Z Fold/Flip, Galaxy Tab S, and 1 single model of A series, the A90 5G. https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS10001955/ https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS10001955/
- hypercube33 2y agoWorks on my S21U. I use it a lot because I have some weird thing where I'll get really tense typing on a touchscreen keyboard, so if I have to type long messages in android-only apps its going on the docking station.
- p2hari 2y agoI used to love Dex, but later they removed the support for macOS. It used to work elegantly and android to mac connection was so easy. Being able to take calls, see messages and also file transfer. :)
- ddifof 2y agoThere was a company named "always innovating" around 2008ish which sold a hybrid of phone/tablet/laptop. Funnily enough, the website still exists [1]. [1] https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/smartbook.htm https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/smartbook.htm
- renewiltord 2y agoUbuntu had a kickstarter but it didn’t succeed.
- orev 2y agoThe sad reality is that market forces don’t want this to happen, since it would cannibalize sales of those other devices. It’s much better for manufacturers to make sure a phone can only do “phone stuff” and a PC can only do “PC stuff”, because then you need to buy both devices.
- alwayslikethis 2y agoI think Google is well-positioned to do it. They have experience with ChromeOS already, and running Linux apps on Android should be at least somewhat plausibly deniable. Google doesn't sell laptops either, so they aren't especially worried about the cannibalization.
- Mindwipe 2y agoMarket forces have included it in every Samsung phone since the S8?
- lostmsu 2y agoTBH Snapdragons aren't quite there yet. Apple chips on the other hand...
- ThrowawayB7 2y agoThe HP Elite x3 running Windows Phone 10 had a dock that would let you plug in a monitor and peripherals to provide a desktop Windows environment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Elite_x3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Elite_x3 If Intel hadn't cancelled their x86 smartphone chip (Broxton?), I wouldn't have been surprised to see an x86 Windows Phone with a desktop mode.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoSingle 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 who’d like their phone to double as a computer is actually rather small — non-technophiles just do everything on their phone these days, and increasingly the main reason anybody keeps around a computer is for more “big iron” sorts of use cases that are too demanding for smartphones. The market for a converged computer-phone device is basically down to people whose needs would be served by a Chromebook, but would prefer an external monitor and keyboard which is rather niche.
- SoftTalker 2y agoI'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 home. I keep my really important stuff on my computer, and try to keep my phone as disposable as possible.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoAnother thing in favor of separate devices, is that for lightweight usecases that benefit from traditional desktop UX (like spreadsheets, as you mentioned) even cheap PCs have been extreme overkill for the better part of two decades at this point — the latest greatest desktop hardware is barely better than a mid-late Core 2 Duo booted off an SSD for productivity. One could buy a cheap mini-PC and put some flavor of Linux on it and it’d serve office software duty for upwards of 10 years without issue. Even accounting for FOSS aftermarket Android distros, smartphone hardware doesn’t have that kind of longevity.
- 2y ago
- poisonborz 2y agoBut we are, for ~6 years now? If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone - the most sold phone models in the world (trades place with Apple sometimes) with 60m+ devices/year sold, just plug it in and there you have it. Full peripherial support, you have a perfect multitasking desktop environment and access the same files - called DeX mode. And yet, this question is here - somehow no one really uses it or even knows about it.
- jeroenhd 2y agoSamsung Dex does this pretty well, and has been for ages now. It's an undersold feature in my opinion. Samsung used to experiment with using Ubuntu for their desktop environment but they shut that down a while back (I forgot why, I guess it was too much of a pain to maintain). Microsoft tried to do it with Windows Phone years ago, but phones were way too slow and Windows on ARM was an even worse prospect at the time, so that died too.
- pmontra 2y agoI own a Galaxy Tab (an s 8.4?) from 2018 with Dex on Linux (or was it Linux or Dex?) It's a docker container running an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop on the Android kernel. They developed it with Canonical to be able to use the hardware of the tablet to do graphics and probably more. Then Android moved on, Ubuntu moved on and probably they would have had to pay Canonical again to keep it up to date, plus dedicating their own engineers to the project. It was axed and removed from the next update from Samsung. It worked well but of course Android would kill any Ubuntu process at random if RAM usage reached a certain threshold, so I wouldn't use it for anything heavy. I remember I was able to run a Ruby on Rails project of mine plus emacs. Slower than my laptop but still decent. The real problem was the limited amount of RAM of the tablet and the insecurity deriving from random process terminations.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoWith respect to hardware only, perhaps. But the OS is still locked down compared to a real desktop OS and the apps are simplified for touch interfaces, and designed for content consumption first and production second.
- sahmeepee 2y agoMy old Samsung S20FE can plug into my office-issue Dell monitor and give me full Dex desktop (also using the second screen) and connect to the keyboard and mouse that stay wirelessly connected to the USB ports on the screens. IIRC it also made use of the headset plugged in via USB. If I was a student with Chromebook-style needs (browser-based tools) it would be worth considering instead of a laptop.
- __turbobrew__ 2y agoIm surprised Apple hasn’t done this yet. I thought about this maybe 5-6 years ago as a product idea. My thought was that you had a monitor with a wireless charging pad built into the base, drop you phone on the base and it automatically connects to the monitor and other peripherals and starts charging. You just pick up your phone and leave and it automatically disconnects. I think other commenters are right that this would cannibalize Apples own products, which is a shame since I think it would be awesome to have a unified computing device. MacOS already runs on arm64 and the iphone has wireless charging and bluetooth, so I don’t think there is a lot stopping Apple from doing this.
- ajdude 2y agoIt would not be hard for them to do this, and some apps exist to emulate a desktop environment when you plug the iPhone into a dock and hook it up to a monitor, but it's pretty sad that Apple won't embrace something like this. Despite the fact that the largest iPhone and smallest iPad are less than 2" difference, the $130 Apple Pencil will not work with an iPhone Pro Max, and both devices run different operating systems with arbitrary features. One of the biggest complaints about their latest iPad was that it's so powerful yet limited by iPadOS. I feel the same way about my iPhone 16 Pro Max. Apple wants you to have an iMac as your desktop, a MacBook for your mobile device, an iPad to watch videos, and an iPhone to bring with you.
- ghaff 2y agoContra Microsoft which tried to use Windows as a beachhead to everything, Apple has actually been pretty successful. I do expect to see more convergence over time. But, even if there are self-interested reasons for not sprinting in that direction, I also think there are good reasons for keeping use cases (e.g. phone/consumer/creator) a bit separated in the near-term rather than forcing everyone in one bucket.
- theshrike79 2y agoI was in a Microsoft event 15-20 years ago. They showed a fantasy video of a construction foreman leaving his house with his phone, casting its contents to different devices (his TV, stereo, car) on the go etc. I still can't do that with any Microsoft system. I've been able to do it with Apple devices for a good 5-10 years.
- dragonwriter 2y agoWe’ve been able to do that for quite a while, actually.
- seba_dos1 2y agoThat's what I was able to do with my Librem 5 in the last few years, so yes. Well, almost - there are two display controllers in that SoC and one of them is limited to the internal screen, so you can't connect "a couple of monitors", just one (4K60Hz). Plasma, GNOME, Phosh, it all just works.
- paxys 2y agoYou just described most Android phones. The features are already there. They are just not that useful for 99% of users.