6 ms·

Maybe, if you are using your desktop PC mainly as an SSH terminal. OTOH there are always going to be tradeoffs between things like weight/battery life and power

by jiggy2011 14y ago

Maybe, if you are using your desktop PC mainly as an SSH terminal. OTOH there are always going to be tradeoffs between things like weight/battery life and power. I assume my smartphone would choke if I threw all the stuff I use on my desktop (eclipse,photoshop,VMs,emulators etc) at it. You might be able to make a smartphone that can do this but then it's unlikely to last as long on batteries or be as lightweight as one that couldn't. Regardless of what computer I'm using , my work is never more than a dropbox sync or git pull away.

bebop 14y ago
Yeah, as far as batter life, I was assuming that any heavy lifting would be done when it was in a docking station and charging. Used like a normal phone when not, as I would never try and program with a touch keyboard. Yeah, dropbox and VCS' work. My main problem is that if I just want to quickly do a few things, it becomes a time burden to spend 5 minutes or so doing the sync (and other things like db updates, what have you). This little extra time sometimes destroys my motivation to work on something real.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Once you start putting extra hardware into the docking station to do heavy lifting you essentially end up back where you are now with a mobile device that can do some but not all tasks but also acts as a mobile filestore. I would imagine that as broadband speeds become faster we will see a diversification of devices rather than the other way around. Things like kindle , roku and xbox seem to be selling a lot better than things like MS Surface for example.
zanny 14y ago
> I assume my smartphone would choke if I threw all the stuff 5 years ago your smartphone would have choked on a GUI transition with transparency. In 5 years, We will probably have ARM v9 with 10 hour battery life easily running these workloads. When the first desktop in your pocket hits the market in force, think of it like the first iphone, tablet, or netbook. Primitive and slow, but a precursor of things to come when efficiency ramps up.

bebop 14y ago

Yeah, as far as batter life, I was assuming that any heavy lifting would be done when it was in a docking station and charging. Used like a normal phone when not, as I would never try and program with a touch keyboard. Yeah, dropbox and VCS' work. My main problem is that if I just want to quickly do a few things, it becomes a time burden to spend 5 minutes or so doing the sync (and other things like db updates, what have you). This little extra time sometimes destroys my motivation to work on something real.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Once you start putting extra hardware into the docking station to do heavy lifting you essentially end up back where you are now with a mobile device that can do some but not all tasks but also acts as a mobile filestore. I would imagine that as broadband speeds become faster we will see a diversification of devices rather than the other way around. Things like kindle , roku and xbox seem to be selling a lot better than things like MS Surface for example.

zanny 14y ago

> I assume my smartphone would choke if I threw all the stuff 5 years ago your smartphone would have choked on a GUI transition with transparency. In 5 years, We will probably have ARM v9 with 10 hour battery life easily running these workloads. When the first desktop in your pocket hits the market in force, think of it like the first iphone, tablet, or netbook. Primitive and slow, but a precursor of things to come when efficiency ramps up.