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Comment by FreakyT | Hacker News Reader

It's definitely neat, but I feel like this has been done before without success -- examples like the Motorola Atrix, Windows Continuum, and even the cancelled Ubuntu Phone come to mind. (And, going further back in time, let's not forget the Palm Foleo!)

It seems like a neat idea on the surface though, so I wonder why as a concept the phone-connected-to-desktop-peripherals thing hasn't gained more traction. My suspicion is that there isn't really a target user that this makes more sense for. Who happens to keep desktop peripherals on their desk but only does lightweight productivity tasks? CEOs who only answer email? Certainly not software developers or even accounting people.

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I have a Samsung Dex, I only use it now to charge my phone. It's useful but not useful enough. It's the sort of experience that works in a pinch but a laptop or desktop delivers a much better desktop experience, and there is no proper RDP app. The MS RDP app doesn't go full screen.

For this to catch on, in my mind, it needs to provided an experience that can replace a desktop, otherwise having to have a dock, monitor, keyboard & mouse, might as well just add an Intel compute stick and have a 10 times better experience.

MS RDP app doesn't go full screen

Wow, this a deal breaker.

Also an easy enough fix, potentially even from within the OS itself as the RDP app prior to the multi-tasking update to Android went full screen just fine.

I successfully use a windows machine through DeX with the Microsoft RD app, but maybe I have developer mode on as several others pointed out (it forces windows to be resizable). Most apps are okay with running in a 16:9 1080p screen even if the display scaling causes issues.

Amazon Spaces also has "first party" support.

I'm curious, how are finding performance for basic stuff like web browsing? Real bummer to hear about the RDP app, that was a big incentive for me, but it's no use if it won't go full screen

It's pretty performant but once you start to really multitask, you can tell you're running with limited resources. If you aren't a heavy multitasker, performance is great!

The one place it really exceeds the desktop is answering calls and responding to text, puts Google Voice and Skype to shame.

Interesting, thanks for the feedback.

I'm somewhat tempted to try it, maybe not at RRP though. Although I get the feeling it will end up in the pile with the Occulus Rift and all the other gimmicky stuff I've accumulated...

My Rift sat around for better part of a year collecting dust, just added room scale to it the other day and it's taken on a new life. If you haven't played with room scale I would recommend giving it a go.

It's amazing when you can be completely immersed and not have to worry about bumping into, or tripping into things. Just finished the Rick and Morty and am playing a "shoot the robots" that are trying to kill you game, very intense, a good workout.

Interesting…have you tried the features in Windows and macOS which allow you to pick up phone calls/texts with your computer? If so, how does it compare?

Windows user, so I can only speak to the Windows 10, and Android phone integration. The integration is cool, but very limited, you can see new notifications, text, email, etc.. and you can respond but you can't do anything else, like view a whole conversation. Tried answering calls but there is no noise cancellation, so you need a headset or callers can hear themselves talking.

It's almost like they have to scrape data by reading notifications, and relaying that, and can't directly interact with the mobile OS on a deeper level. Ultimately not super useful for me, hope Android Oreo provides more opportunities for greater integration.

> The one place it really exceeds the desktop is answering calls and responding to text

So you're saying your cell phone makes a better cell phone than a desktop computer? That's about what I figured.

Why would web browsing be any different to performance on a phone or iPad; it's just connecting an external display over USB-to-HDMI? As long as the phone's GPU supports that...

For me, I browse the web differently on desktop, for example on desktop if I visit HN, I might open 5 different links and their comments at once before visiting them one by one. In the middle of that I might open email, and then open tabs from the email. I could easily end up with several windows with 6-7 tabs in each open.

That sort of thing I would never do on my phone or tablet, just because of the form factor I keep my footprint much smaller.

I'm currently using an iPhone 5, have 11 tabs open and am streaming music from spotify.

Other than occasional crashes and a tiny bit of lag, my aged phone handles it very well.

On the other hand, when I'm on the desktop I open multiple browser instances with 20+ tabs open on each of them. I guess I have a problem :).

i generally have around 50 to 100 tabs open on my phone, previously HTC One (the first m7) and now Hauwai Honor 8. Buts thats not what your parent was talking about. It takes time to close tabs on the phone.

yes, its (at least on android) just swiping twice (once from the top to open the window view and then to the side to close it), but even that takes more effort than just mouse-wheel clicking on the tab.

After that tab is closed, the browser needs to rebuild the new/old tab. thats even more time you wouldn't have on the desktop.

everything just takes a little longer on the highly performance optimized phone, and it adds up to stop - at least me - from just going into the comments threads. especially because actually opening takes even longer, as you'd have to long press on the link to get that option.

now, with this device you'd be able to actually click/close tabs as fast as on your general desktop. Suddenly, the device is no longer constrained by the slow inputs that the user is giving. And now, the phone will actually need to perform that much better with the same amount of resources. I haven't used the DeX and don't know wherever its able to handle that, but thats (i think) the thing most people hearing about it are worried about.

I've been stress testing my dex setup and it's surprisingly performant. To push it to the limits I decided to start a youtube channel documenting how it goes and I'm not even using the official DeX station, just a $20 ripoff from china. It's been suprisingly powerful to edit video on and even have all the files on same device. Even the adobe suite is suprisingly well implemented on android. I find that any issue I have with missing programs I can find on XDA in the form of an apk file.

http://youtube.com/c/DennisAleynikov

Would you mind sharing your clone that you have tried?? Thanks

I think the biggest problem is the price point.

The person who most wants to use their phone as a PC is the person who can't afford spending $4000 on the entire suite of Apple devices.

That person probably also can't afford a $100 dock (let alone a $300 one) for their phone.

When someone makes a USB-C/Thunderbolt/Intel/Windows device that is phone sized but runs legacy Windows applications (like MS Paint and Quickbooks and 90s-era video games), and connects with commodity connectors, then the idea stands a chance.

(IMHO, Windows Continuum died because of a chicken-and-egg problem -- no iOS devs wanted to pay $1000 for Visual Studio plus a Windows laptop, but no users used the phone because key apps were missing.)

I don't think the price comparison is fair. If someone spends 700$ on a phone, he would be ok spending 200$ if the system does work smoothly.

What I think people are more skeptic about is performance and user experience.

Are you forgetting that most people get their phones with their plans?

People will feel that they can absorb $20 or even $30 extra per month on their plan for a top tier phone. Absorbing any hit over $200 when someone lives hand to mouth makes these a non-starter.

The best chance for mass success for this option is for it to be included in the base purchase.

Well there is nothing preventing Dex from coming with a monthly plan. Note that all plans are very low interest rate loans, there is nothing special about a phone plan.

Also, majority of people just use email and word suite. An S9 is easily capable of doing these tasks and it saves the individual or company cost of a cpu box (400 USD at the low end).

Plans are also just generally a good way to hide the actual cost of the device. Notice that, when you walk into a Verizon store, they aren't saying "BUY PHONE FOR $760!" they're saying "A New iPhone for just $32/mo!" So most of these people aren't going "Oh MAN only $760 in the end?!" they're going "I can afford $32/mo!"

My point is, it really doesn't matter what the reality of the cost/loan is, people who think "$30/mo! I can do that!" are probably not also going to think $200 seems like a good price for basically a cable to plug my phone into my computer.

Obviously, your other point was that it could come with a plan too but that seems doable but also there's yet another cost on top of the phone they were just barely justifying already. I'm not saying you're wrong but I think the price of this device is ridiculous.

I might pay $80 for it if it were really something I needed but, as others have said, I don't carry my phone around to be a computer. I carry it to be a phone. On top of that, I never really have a situation where I've got a keyboard, mouse, and monitor just sitting around waiting for something to activate them. So I'm not sure when I'd use this anyway.

> What I think people are more skeptic about is performance and user experience.

I think that's what the parent was talking about: Most people that wouldn't mind a simpler UX and less performance can't afford this phone/dock in a first place... and the people that would afford this (have an S8 and don't mind buying a $300 dock) will be skeptical about the usefulness and performance of this system.

They already have a few iPads and laptops.

Except most people don't think of themselves as "someone who spends $700 on a phone", they pay $x9.95/month for $y00 minutes talktime plus $zGB of data and they get a "free" phone every two years... I doubt any of those people would think it's a good idea to spend an extra ~$15/month for a thing that lets them plug a screen/keyboard/mouse into their "free" phone.

Yeah, and, to be honest, I've bought both of my phones I've had over the last few years and there's no way in hell I'd spend another $200 on a stupid dock. If this were an $80 device I might go for it but they killed it with a high price tag. Surprise surprise!

No this model is dead. They pay $x0/month for unlimited everything (with X gigs of high speed data) and then another $20 or $30 a month for the equipment lease or installment plan. The 2 year contract is dead, and we got something worse to replace it.

A lot more good phones are available off-contract than in 2012 or so, and plenty come at reasonable prices.

(I've always had a prepaid smartphone, and the options were atrocious in 2010 and barely existed beyond the Nexus in 2012)

Not everywhere.

Here in Europe, contracts are the exception not the rule.

Most people just charge with 15 to 20 euros their SIM card whenever they feel like it, and have to pay full price for mobile phone.

Or pay it in rates to only have it unlocked from the network at the end of two years, so they are going to use that phone until it dies or gets stolen.

> Here in Europe, contracts are the exception not the rule.

I'm pretty sure that hasn't been true for years.

Data to back it up please, since you are pretty sure?

"Around 70% of customers in Western Europe and China use prepaid phones with the figure rising to over 90% for customers in India and Africa"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepay_mobile_phone

I only know people with contracts regarding iPhone, which is the only affordable way to get them new in many of the European countries.

That data is from 2012. I don’t have any feeling for what it currently is (most people I know are on contract, but that’s specifically the people I know), so it would be good to see up to date data.

I know, but it was the only one I could quickly find out.

As teamhappy pointed out, I am kind of wrong, as the data did indeed change for contracts, but was is still low in 2015 regarding southern countries, the ones I tend to visit regularly.

But it would still be nice to know if someone can point out to 2017 data.

China is cited by an OP. No serious options in China for contract phone.

What has become super common is for home cable provider to provide SIM with around 2G of data in order to pay monthly broadband charge. SIM recharge being easier than vanilla broadband recharge.

    > while in Europe the proportion is 50%, reaching 75% in
    > Northwestern Europe as compared to 40% in South-Eastern
    > European states.

https://www.globalrewardsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/GRS...

Data is from 2015. Given the overall trend I wouldn't be surprised if even more people have switched to contract by now.

Thanks. I do confess as south-european that probably my reality is a bit biased, as you can still see on the report.

But I do agree from 2012 to 2015 it did change in the direction you meant.

> That person probably also can't afford a $100 dock (let alone a $300 one) for their phone.

well the atrix costed $400 usd and even with a monthly plan was way cheaper than the samsung galaxy s8

and even on a monthly plan it was cheaper than the current galaxys. still all people bought the galaxys

To be fair, you don't need $1000 to start developing UWP apps for Continuum. You just need a Windows license (~50$) since you can install it on Macs, and you can use Visual Studio Community, which is free (as in beer). Of course, plus the Continuum-enabled device, like a Lumia 950, but that's technically optional since you can debug your app on your local machine.

The competition for phone dock is from cheap laptop or desktop. Also, phone dock requires monitor and keyboard which is extra expense. Most people would choose laptop before full desk setup. There are also all-in-one computers and compute sticks that provide cheap alternatives for someone who wants simple or portable.

I already have dual monitors, keyboard, usb audio and mouse. Via a KVM switch, they drive a Windows 10 laptop and a Linux box.

So I don't need additional computers in my life but if my phone had docking support I'd seamlessly just plug it into my existing setup.

As the laptop and pc depreciate over time and phone hardware improves with every generation, a DeX platform becomes more attractive as a node on my KVM setup.

> The person who most wants to use their phone as a PC is the person who can't afford spending $4000 on the entire suite of Apple devices.

I'd love to have just one computing device that covers everything for the sake of simplicity. At times I've found myself carrying a smartphone, laptop, tablet and a smart watch, plus ton of cables and adapters... almost 10 pounds or 5kg of electronics just to cover all my use cases. Dragging that through airports for example is ridiculous.

The iPhone in my pocket is as powerful as basically any iPad, and more powerful than many laptops.

An iPad is powerful enough for most typical workloads.

Therefore, my iPhone is powerful enough for most workloads.

If I could dock my phone into something that gave me a monitor, keyboard, and (so I don't have to lift my arm up over and over) a trackpad, that would solve my home computing needs 85% of the time.

Well the phone is already a trackpad, you can mirror the screen wireless via an Apple TV, and you can use a Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, I’m doing all 3 to write this (The user-experience is more than acceptable, but I’m not going to try to use the setup for coding any time soon).

Apple could pull the trigger on running full OSX on a phone or iPad if they thought there was a market for it but it would be a backwards-looking step.

It’s not exactly an innovation leap to think “hey, phones will match desktop PC performance, we could plug one into peripherals and make a device that can become a desktop”, everyone has had that idea. It just seems a bit backwards looking? In 10 years time the power of a current Mac Pro will probably be available in a watch with 5G+ bandwidth. If necessary, a desktop OS experience could be an app or a cloud service on whichever screen (or headset) is available.

TDP matters for serious work. Over normal work periods, that ipad is going to continue to operate at a fairly high frequency while the iphone will throttle because it can't dissipate as much heat. Dissipation and size affect many other parts of system design too (eg, memory speed, width, and size).

I have the same sentiment and when more apps run in the cloud, and all one needs is a fast web browser, that will make it more of a possibility to do coding, digital media editing, etc. from anywhere with available peripherals.

The entire home wall video monitor in the beginning of the movie Total Recall (first version) would be great to have everywhere. Just as you change music you could make your environment look like anything and this same technology would let you grab a little near by space to use as a screen. Too expensive now but in ten years, perhaps.

Don't get hung up too much on the price. They charge that because they can.

Expect Xiaomi to release a $25 knockoff for their phones if there's ever a demand for it. I suspect there's very little in the dock hardware itself over a standard USB-C OTG charging hub with HDMI passthrough and an ethernet port. Maybe I'm wrong but the rest is just software on the phone?

It is indeed only software, I bought a $25 USB-C to HDMI dongle on Ebay and it works just like the Samsung DeX device.

It's $60 on eBay (new), how's that a problem?

The Huawei Mate has the same feature and uses a normal hdmi connector. Infact I recollect seeing a youtube video[1] and there is probably a thread on xda [2] that got Samsung Dex working with a normal usb-c to hdmi connector.

It's a useful feature and because we already have too many devices finds little use but once its seamless it could offer many possibilities.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s50GWuKphTI

[2] https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s8/how-to/dex-unexpe...

Yeah, DeX used some relatively obscure DisplayPort based implementation of Usb-C to HDMI, as long as you're using that (might be called slimport) it works. I'm getting away with using a $20 dongle.

As an IT consultant who travels a lot and works for different customers I'd love a smartphone that could double as a powerful development machine when plugged into a larger screen. No need to carry around and worry about a laptop anymore.

For such a setup to work and really make sense though it'd have to be available as near-ubiquitous infrastructure one could expect in every hotel and every office.

I suppose, however, the travelling tradesman / digital nomad target audience just isn't large and profitable enough (as of now at least) to warrant such a large-scale infrastructure undertaking.

You probably are better off with a laptop or a tablet/convertible still because you can't guarantee a desk with a screen under those conditions, not to mention that the performance you can get from a phone today given it's power and thermal limitations is still quite limited.

If anything I would love to see a modern version of the Droid/Milestone I never understood why Motorola stopped making them, the Milestone was by far the best device I ever had.

Not to mention the security issues of relying on a Hotel/whatever's input/output devices.

Check out the Gemini PDA on indiegogo. Looks to be the successor of Psion or the droid 4.

That's really not in the same class as the Droid/Milestone. This is an ultra small laptop, much larger than a phone and cannot really be used as one.

The Droid wasn't bigger than an average Android phone at the time and still packed an almost full keyboard and a dpad.

I had an Atrix and it was awesome. I could fire it from the dock and get a full featured Linux desktop right from my phone! And keep clicking through until I got bored and turned on my laptop.

Same thing with the built-in Linux desktop on a Asus motherboard I had, I don't even remember the name of the thing.

I believe the concept is here to stay, but like tablet PCs back in 2003 it did not find its niche yet. There aren't just too many occasions you'd have a mouse, a keyboard, a monitor, but not some kind of x86_64 computer near.

Still, it's likely the breeding ground for a number of innovations and it may finally catch up...it just does not make so much sense to me to include only on the flagship products: why would you cut so much people on the mid range out of a feature you don't even know if and where will catch up?

The obvious use is laptop bans on flights and docking your phone to your hotel room's TV.

Why so hung up about a keyboard and mouse? Even the local supermarkets here sell them dirt cheap these days.

Splashtop?

https://gizmodo.com/393861/asus-notebooks-getting-splashtop-...

Yeah, what's the problem this solves?

Here's one it could (but doesn't quite) solve.

At my office everyone carries around their laptop and is constantly trying to get it to work with the telecomm and video software. Some people have a work phone, a work laptop and a personal phone too. I even know some people who add a tablet to that mix. Sometimes I see them bouncing around between all those devices.

For most employees (not necessarily coders) it probably makes sense to just have one device: a phone that you can edit excel and powerpoint on. A universal dock should exist in every meeting room and on every desk.

The major impediments to this are currently the power of the device, the ability to use the os for actually making things, and the existence of a decent dock.

With this dock and the power of the latest generation of phones, we're just stuck on the fact that no one has been able to make an os that actually works well on both mobile devices and as a keyboard/mouse driven system for creating things.

Yeah, I'm looking straight at you, Windows 8.

The "universal" part of your universal dock is going to be a big problem. Unless everyone in your office is going to use the same phone, or everybody gets a dedicated dock for their own phone, this isn't going to fly.

I think it's still too early from a hardware performance/connectivity point of view. Once your average $200 smartphone is powerful enough to power a normal desktop when plugged into a trivial, cheap and ubiquitos connector (USB C?), this kind of thing will take off.

I have no idea how the software will look though. Maybe it will be just a fancy and reall easy to use remote connection, in the end?

Smartphones are already more powerful than the desktop computers of, say, a few years ago and are already capable of comfortably running a browser and an office suite without any performance problems.

So it isn't a question of computing power, it's a question of utility: who actually needs this? What benefit does it provide over and above just having a cheap PC to do PC things and a smartphone to do smartphone things and syncing documents between the two? It's not cheaper, it's not more convenient, it's not more productive, it's not more powerful, so what's the point?

Right now? There's no point cause you skipped part of my comment.

It should be trivial for me to turn my phone into a computer. I should need only a $20 USB hub in order to power my phone and connect it to a keyboard, mouse, one or even several screens. Or even connect them wirelessly.

Then, the OS should trivially handle this case and offer me access to high quality desktop apps.

I don't think either condition is true now.

When this point is reached I'm pretty sure half of the laptop sales will evaporate within a short time.

User DennisAleynikov in this thread says he has it working with a $20 USB-C to HDMI cable, without even needing to buy the official Samsung DeX connector. Once plugged in, the phone lets you run desktop Android apps straight away.

Check the Samsung DeX page to see how it looks. The use case you've described is already here.

Cool. Still, availability, word of mouth, marketing, etc.

It's one thing when a random person (no offense, Dennis Aleynikov) does it, another one when you have 6 big companies competing for this segment.

And I'm not sure the software part is here. At least not in a polished way. The closest solutions that come to mind are Microsoft UWP (but Microsoft doesn't seem to be gaining traction due to various reasons, not least because they're Microsoft and few people trust them these days...) and Ubuntu Unity (I think they've abandoned the concept?). From what I've read Android tablet and desktop apps are not really up-to-par, at least today.

IMO, issue in the past has always been performance - using those phones was just a frustrating experience. With something disgustingly overspecced like the Note8 I imagine you could probably get pretty smooth performance in most apps, even multitasking.

As for use cases, I think there'd be a few;

1. As you've said, C-levels

2. Home users that don't want a computer, but work from a desk (I actually think this would be a huge market)

3. Weirdo's like me who'd set up a new desk in my home just for this, and maybe use it once. I suspect there'd be a few of us...

4. Mobile 'knowledge' workers, another potentially large market here.

For just about all of those, they're going to be among the least patient users you could ask for so again performance is going to be HUGE. If a Word doc takes more than a couple of seconds to open, then that's a problem.

The time is not right yet, but mobile hardware gets faster a rapid pace and the upcoming Linux on Galaxy [1] might change things to be more useful.

[1] https://seap.samsung.com/linux-on-galaxy

Oh, I assumed DeX was Samsung's Linux on Galaxy project. What's under the hood with both? What kind of OS is DeX? What kind of DE would Linux on Galaxy run?

DeX is a dock that tells your phone to go to "desktop mode". It is still Android.

With "Linux on Galaxy" I guess you'd be running whatever DE you like. Unless they've done it differently and you're in DeX desktop but can run full Linux apps there. Not sure.

The technology is still too immature. Mobile apps aren't designed for desktop UIs, so mobile apps thrown up on a desktop monitor are going to suck. Desktop apps are usually compiled for x86 and not ARM, so you can't run desktop apps within a desktop environment that's thrown up on a monitor by your phone.

Microsoft has been trying to throw Windows onto ARM for a long time, to no commercial success, because the entire value proposition is the enormous back catalog of Win32 applications which will never run performantly on ARM. So the best bet is Linux leading the change, with Linux on ARM powering desktops and driving demand for desktop apps to be compiled to ARM - but yeah, not going to happen any time soon.

"so I wonder why as a concept the phone-connected-to-desktop-peripherals thing hasn't gained more traction."

I think there's a slightly different model that makes even more sense ...

What we see with DeX (and Altrix, etc.) is the phone as the CPU that gets plugged into larger devices.

But what I think makes more sense is a smaller module, as the CPU, that gets plugged into larger devices including a phone.

So instead of plugging your phone into your "PC" you would move the core module from your phone, to your PC.

That way the core module can be much smaller and can power future phone upgrades, etc.

I think a PCMCIA[1] card (a "PC-CARD") would be a great form factor for the compute module...

[1] People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

<reminisce> I loved the palm foleo - it was such a revolution. Great keyboard, many hours of battery, and all my info there with my palm tungsten! </reminisce>

I recall vaguely the Foleo was famously cancelled without ever actually shipping to any customers. Not much of a revolution, by any standard, and not one many of us are going to share in reminiscing over!

> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/18/palm_foleo_laptop_u...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Foleo

There are also similar free projects: Maru OS (https://maruos.com) and Sentio Desktop (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andromium....), but not so popular.

> Who happens to keep desktop peripherals on their desk but only does lightweight productivity tasks?

On the local machine? People whose serious work is done remotely, e.g., using Virtual Desktop infrastructure or cloud services. Heck, with even gaming starting to be doable remotely in the cloud, it's more credible every day that people can live with just light productivity and persistent browser state locally.

See, I've never gotten a chance to use it before but I've heard great things with how well Windows Continuum performed and worked overall. One person told me it was like being on their desktop for basic things. It's hard to compare much with Continuum since it was essentially killed with the Windows Phone.

It's a neat idea, ultimately, but I think we're a few years away from a good way to do it UX wise.

I think libraries and open space offices with no personal seating are the best place to use such a device. Libraries supply the screen/mouse/keyboard/internet and you bring your device.

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