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Comment by LeoNatan25 | Hacker News Reader

“Maru is a new kind of computing experience.”

Is it? This type of “All Your PC Are Belong To Phone” type of fads have been attempted (and so far, miserably failed) for many, many years now. Looking at the website, I see little reason why this should succeed where others have failed.

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It’s an OS for your phone that becomes a proper desktop OS if you plug in a monitor, mouse, keyboard etc.

I don’t think this has been done before, or maybe I’m just hopelessly unaware?

Either way, I think it’s quite interesting.

Motorola Atrix, Ubuntu Phone, Windows Phone 10 has Continuum. It's been tried before.

I stand corrected then.

I don't think this makes sense until phones are basically as fast as current laptops.

The flagship phone for this OS is the nexus 5 which uses a 2.26 Ghz quad core qualcomm chip and has 2 gb ram. The hw limitation seems to be the low ram limiting the number of memory heavy desktop apps you can run. Definitely not a video editing rig and vbox doesn't work on arm hosts, but this is good for spread sheets / typing up papers / scanning things with your camera and quickly editing them on a desktop with out any data transfer hassles.

Exactly, the complaint of power users is that "it'll never be as powerful as my Core i7 desktop". Were a phone solution seamless enough to dock into my kvm switch, I'd power up my 'workstation' far less often.

The CPU speed for all mobile devices is deceptive. You can't actually run the CPU at that speed for anything but the tiniest amount of time, without immediately running into the throttling brick wall.

Doesn't Apple have laptops in their current lineup which are less powerful than their top of the line phone?

The MacBook isn't a very strong machine. Wouldn't be surprised if A10 beats it even in single-core performance.

And now, also Samsung DeX, but that one requires a Galaxy S8 and a special dock.

The dock is really just breaking out the USB-C port to the various docks no reason it couldn't be replicated with a USB-C hub other than software lockin. Not sure there's any reason it couldn't be done with any other phone that has USB-C either.

I think the big factor with the DeX dock is the big fan that runs to cool off the phone while it's in that mode.

Yeah, but these would never work with VR. The moment phones became capable of delivering smooth VR, i.e. smooth graphics, the phone PC became a strong possibility for quotidian tasks.

Yes, and it took around 20 years to go from the patent for the first underpinnings of applications for phones other than communication in the 1970s to Simon Personal Communicator in the early 90s, and then another 10-15 years for the first smart phones to emerge. If people gave up because it "had been tried before", we wouldn't have any of the technology we had (in fact, we would still be planting crops with wooden sticks because Thog got trampled trying to chase some wildebeest off of his early attempts at farming).

Nobody is denouncing it because it isn't new, they're just saying that they shouldn't claim it's a new kind of experience when it doesn't really seem like a new kind of experience.

Wooden sticks? Crops? Bet they took a few iterations to get right too.

Continuum is arguably a successful implementation of this idea, with the unfortunate handicap of being on a platform nobody wants.

Many Windows developers do want UWP, it is Longhorn done right.

Microsoft is giving it another go with Windows S, which is continuum without the phone part.

I have a windows phone with continuum and tried it, and while it is executed quite well, it wasn't very useful due to the lack of apps. You can use any windows 10 device as a screen/keyboard/mouse, but usually the laptops I have near me are mine, so they already have everything I need. If it had an ability to carry a self-contained programming environment I might have played around with it more.

It does make a fine fallback presenting device. You put your powerpoint slides on the phone, and if all else fails you can project your slides to any w10 laptop that's near.

It may not be new to the world, but it's likely new to users. Many recycled ideas go on to change the world in a second (or third, or nth) attempt.

Did Ubuntu Phone ever actually work?

Yes.

Motorola webtop on Atrix was too early - phones were just too slow for even basic browsing in Firefox in laptop mode.

Perhaps Maru is smooth enough on new hardware?

(Still have the lapdock lying around, now hooked into RPi.)

In your experience, how well does the lapdock run with an RPi? I have a lapdock lying around, and never thought of this for some reason.

Not the person you replied to but I have the same setup. The only real issue is getting the adapters so they can be connected (plenty available on a variety of websites, but of questionable quality).

For me it's mostly a novelty - I put RiscOS on it to try it out, and it seems snappy enough. But it's a mess of cables - I never got around to making it as pretty as some [1]

[0] https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi

[1] https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/27081

Thanks! This looks like a pretty simple solution to me.

Well this probably isn't going to succeed where others failed, but the idea is good.

I'm glad someone is trying to move forward with the idea of using the very capable computer in your pocket as more than a phone. I mean my current phone has more ram than my last laptop....

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