This is sort of what canonical is trying to do with Ubuntu and Unity. The phones they'll be coming out with later this year are said to be a "full os" in the fo

This is sort of what canonical is trying to do with Ubuntu and Unity. The phones they'll be coming out with later this year are said to be a "full os" in the form factor of a phone. The interface is made to allow you to pair your device with an external device (say screen and keyboard) and the interface adjusts its self to that form factor (think "responsive design"). So at say a public library, they could have these cheap terminals that people with phones can just walk up to and use with their phone as the computing platform and the peripherals as just an input interface. Right now every major manufacturer is putting out two OSs (chrome/android, windows/winphone, osx/iOS), and I think they're just now realizing it doesn't make sense, I mean google even touts chrome as mobile OS, why the heck are they making two? I don't think they have any plans to combine the two projects, but I really hope we aren't using java vms everywhere in the future. It seems microsoft is now rethinking windows 8 and their phones aren't selling well (for a number of reasons) and I think most likely they'll be coming out with a convergent OS soon. It'll probably be a rip off of unity or gnome shell.