4 ms·
Yeah. I never much saw the value of that, myself -- PCs are relatively cheap these days. But it's the only feature that the Ubuntu phone was offering that made
by cwyers 12y ago
Yeah. I never much saw the value of that, myself -- PCs are relatively cheap these days. But it's the only feature that the Ubuntu phone was offering that made it stand out from Android/iOS/Windows Phone/Blackberry/FirefoxOS/Sailfish. It's launching far later than most of its competitors, with fewer features and a less developed ecosystem to support it -- without some kind of killer app (which this might have been) it's probably DOA.
- bentcorner 12y agoI think it'll be a useful feature to have. Say what you will about "the cloud" and all - syncing local storage and personal customizations is not well solved, so keeping "your pc" in your pocket at all times would be a useful thing to have.
- vidarh 12y agoMobile devices are getting powerful enough to be your PC. PC prices and performance have stagnated because most people are deeming the low end of the market "powerful enough", and so mobile devices are rapidly catching up. As much as cloud services help gloss over the effect of moving from device to device, there is still plenty of state on my devices, and it would be great to have all of that state in one place, and then it needs to be on the smallest device. My laptop is on its way to becoming a dumb terminal anyway: I keep less and less state on it, because I don't always have it with me. My phone on the other hand is always in my pocket.
- bane 12y agoRight. My workday basically starts fishing my laptop out of my bag and plugging in all the stuff so I have a decent keyboard, mouse and monitor. Why shouldn't my PC just be my phone? I actually have everything I need for most of my work on my phone: several reasonable Office productivity softwares (including the official Office mobile), a tabbed terminal window with ssh, a browser. My phone has 3d acceleration, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (with an sd card slot so I could bump it up). The resolution it operates at 1080x1920 or something ridiculous and more than sufficient for desktop needs. It has a usb port I can hook up to a hub for keyboard and mouse and it supports MHL so I can mirror the screen on a decent monitor. Hell, if I stick under my hand it's a decent touchpad interface and my Note 3 even has pen input so I could use it as an "artist tablet". The problem is of course not hardware, but software. The hardware is more than sufficient, the apps are functionally capable, but they lack the right kind of UI metaphor to make it work as a desktop. It's so close, but somehow so far.
- semi-extrinsic 12y agoWhy do you take your laptop home with you? Why not just leave it plugged in at work (or get a workstation with more power for less money)? Surely you can ssh (or vpn) in if you need to work from home?
- bane 12y agoWe have a crazy corporate security plan, everything's encrypted, limited out-to-in network access etc. Most of the major systems are only accessible from your internally assigned IP, etc. VPN only auths from our issued computers, servers only auth from those computers etc. It's all pretty seamless from our issued computers, but it's a pain inducing minefield trying to do anything outside of that. It's just a rMBP, so it's not like I'm huffing around a 12lb Dell monster or anything. But it seems kind of pointless when the computer in my pocket is good enough technologically for most things.