Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmkni | Hacker News Reader

I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work.

Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode.

We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be phone sized, around 5.5" or so with a good battery life when operating as a phone, a decent processor, a decent amount of Ram (8GB at least), and about 500GB of SSD storage.

With a Surface or equivalent tablet, you still need to carry around a bag with you to carry it in which is a pain. If that could be small enough to fit in your pocket that would be ideal!

View on HN

Does the development environment have to be housed entirely on the phone itself? I ask because phones are too underpowered for most dev work. But, cloud technology is getting to the point where you can play AAA video games remotely with low latency using a modest computer as a client.

To extend on what you have, I think it would be really cool to have a phone app that brings up a remotely-hosted triple monitor dev environment when it's docked. The actual dev server could be anywhere and all you would need to access it, both at home and at work, is the phone. Kind of like a visual tmux.

edited: removed "which is why the many attempts at making desktop docks for phones have failed". There are many reasons they have failed, but not catering to devs probably isn't one of them. :)

Cloud is problematic because of cost of bandwidth and storage compared to local solutions. Until bandwidth is actually plentiful, uncapped, and cheap, I would rather have a local solution.

We're talking about a setup that's already plugged into the wall (triple monitors, keyboard, mouse). Just have the phone use Wifi.

I'll admit, having a self contained setup would be nicer, but that's not going to happen until batteries get much denser or phones get a lot more efficient.

I'm not sure why what I plug it into cannot have its own computing and storage power. There are wired caps on data too.

In fact, why the heck did Apple sell a display and an iMac? Why not insert a processor board (a blade) into the display to turn it into an iMac? Why was the Mac Pro anything more than a bunch of slots for blades?

I want to carry a small display, some storage, and computing power and be able to dock it with more storage, display, and computing power. I really think we need to examine the PC in the post-PC world. Given the prices, I'm fine with the cloud being my backup, not work environment.

Hmm. That's an interesting idea. How would the phone and the PC work together, though? I could see it work if they were all the same architecture. Then you're just adding more ram and cores.

Actually, the ram could be an issue. For example, say you're running a video editing program that's using 15gb of ram and you want to undock. You'd need some way of storing the state of the program and the ram its using when it's not docked. Either that or you'd be forced to shut it down completely.

Storage was a solved issue with the Newton Soups in the 90's, but other systems won. Memory could work the same way. Run the programs that required the high ram on the machine I docked to (using local dock storage replicating what I need from my phone) and when I unplug save the state. Perhaps back it up to network in that state in case I plug into a different dock next time.

They wouldn't need to be the same architecture, but use a common means of communicating for coordinating tasks.

There's some precedent in the design of the Transputer plus daughterboards. Borrowing from the latter to handle the heterogenous nature of phone/PC pairings.

Making it hot-swappable would, of course, be a challenge. Using physical mechanisms to hold the device means that boards/phones/whatevers could be ejected safely only once various conditions (state saving, rerouting of data, etc.) were met.

I was so excited when Microsoft demoed their Display Dock[1] for the Lumia 950s. It was the first step towards what you describe, a phone that becomes a desktop case when connected to the necessary peripherals.

I am also saddened that it seems like Microsoft is leaving mobile so it's unlikely we'll see a next iteration of this.

---

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en/mobile/accessory/hd-500/

Microsoft might be leaving the mobile hardware business, but they're not the only ones making Windows Phone hardware. The HP Elite x3 just came out with this same feature. You can use the "Connect" app to pull up a remote desktop from any Win10 PC, or put it into a special dock that plugs into a normal keyboard mouse and monitor, or connect to a wireless monitor over Miracast.

Have you seen Andromium as an early take on this concept?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook...

That's very cool!

Windows phones already do this, less development tools. Its cool because e.g. Word mobile has the desktop and phone UI in the same package and presents itself appropriately.

I would be surprised if, with more competitive Intel chips or x86 on ARM emulation (the latter of this is in the works afaik), this didn't happen sooner or later.

Microsoft showcased something similar - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/accessory/hd-500/ using Windows Phones

I don't want VC funding, I want Microsoft to go in this direction. Their phone OS was great, I generally like their tablets, and most desktop software works already on Windows. If anyone from Microsoft is listening I want them to do this.

Yep, I am genuinely excited to see where Microsoft goes with this.

Do you mean like Windows Continuum? It is only ARM, but I've heard rumors of an x86 Surface Phone sometime next year.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum

Reminds me of the Switch. I mean, that's gaming instead of dev, but it's a pretty similar concept.

I wonder if Nintendo will sell docks separately from the system for that purpose? I would hope so.

And let us install whatever OS we want on that hw.

Motorolla had this thing about 5 years ago: http://allthingsd.com/20110216/motorola-atrix-android-phone-...

It sounds like it didn't perform that great but with the more modern phone hardware and possibly some hardware in the dock to help with coprocessing (graphics card, more RAM, etc), you could build something quite useful. With the advent of USB Type C, docking stations for phones could definitely work. Gigabyte has even showed off a Thunderbolt/Type C external graphics card. I can definitely see souped up docking stations coming out within the next year or so. I could also see laptop versions of this coming out soon too for users that want a more portable version.

So, you want Ubuntu convergence?

I had the same urge to carry a small, capable device to make phone call and do development work. I don't need much RAM or storage as long as it's enough to rotate to one project sandbox. The closest I found so far is: http://www.solu.co

What you want is nearly possible: Intel's current generation of Compute Sticks (CS325 and CS525) are the size of a USB stick but have 2 cores, 4GB of RAM, and 64 GB of disk space. Granted, you can't use it on the go but it is ultra portable.

I don't understand. If you already are planning on using it with 3 monitors, what is the advantage of making it so portable? Why not just leave a slightly larger device where the monitors are and use the small device as storage / boot disk?

I guess.

I just like the idea that, if I am contracting in a couple of different places, have one of these setups in each one, rock up with my phone and boom!

I can see the appeal, but it still seems way easier just to put a cheap computer in eah location with equivalent compute power to a phone and carry around the SSD.

Ubuntu phone

Reply on news.ycombinator.com