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Comment by tinyvm | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool.

I've been looking for such thing for a long time now.

If you have a corporate Job like consulting or something equivalent it's very likely you are packing an awful laptop with you everywhere you go, a DELL or a Lenovo or something like that.

DEX opens a door for next generation Mobile Desktop , where you SmartPhone is also your Desktop Computer.

I really hope Apple does something similar in this area , the new iPad can be connected to a screen, but the real deal would be using the iPhone with as a laptop...

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Also consider Chromebooks. You get the desktop version of Chrome (ie whatever extensions you want), windowed interface, runs Android apps, and via the rapidly maturing Crostini project you can also run Linux apps. Heck on Intel based Chromebooks you can run Steam and use Proton/SteamPlay to run Windows games (and other Windows apps).

The nicest thing about the Chromebooks is that the software is identical, but the hardware varies from $200 cheapo devices all the way up to almost $2,000. This means you are far more likely to find your own sweet spot of price, size, memory & cpu, storage etc.

Some also have LTE so can be used as an alternative to a phone.

> Also consider Chromebooks.

Because of their dependence on Google servers, Chromebooks (or using any cloud-based service) make it very hard to satisfy confidentiality requirements that are imposed by clients for consulting jobs.

> DEX opens a door for next generation Mobile Desktop , where you SmartPhone is also your Desktop Computer.

Remember, Microsoft tried this with Continuum for Windows 8/10 and Windows Mobile, it failed. No-one actually wanted the core of their desktop inside their phones. People have partitioned off different use-cases for their PC and smartphones, and the overlap is smaller than designers think.

we still need the pc revolution on mobile devices.

we are still in the mainframe/timeshare stage.

> we still need the pc revolution on mobile devices.

The PC revolution happened because of very open hardware specifications and a non-monopoly on the firmware (the IBM BIOS was reverse-engineered by Compaq).

That revolution was due to a mistake on IBM's part.

It wasn't that no one wanted them - they just weren't powerful or portable enough.

Snapdragon's 835 changed that. So will the A12X from Apple.

I think you’re underestimating Apple’s chip performance. Going by https://browser.geekbench.com/ the best performing Android devices(Samsung’s special thing for single-core, Snapdragon 845 in a OnePlus for multi-core) appear around even with an A10 for single-core and an A10X with multi-core. If this/last year’s Android chips were enough to make Dex viable, you’d expect last generation’s iPad Pro and the iPhone 7 to be capable of running Apple’s solution.

Oh not at all. Apple chips are beasts and surpass anything out there.

But it's likely a greater chance to see a snapdragon head into a convertible desktop format than an iPhone or iPad, neither even allow a mouse. Still have hope for an A12X powering a MacBook tho.

The Snapdragon 835 is not the enabler here. A mid-range 5-year-old phone has 4 cores at 2+ GHz, more powerful than a 10-year-old computer. Even back then this was powerful enough to run plenty of desktop workloads. The thing that's enabling usage of phones as desktops is USB Type-C which is fast enough and versatile enough to carry video output and a USB singal while powering the phone.

Absolutely. The power of the 835 was not the processing power alone, but pairing the 835 with greater than 3 gb of RAM. This helps push it into a desktop capable experience.

I bought a Sentio Superbook, and my pixel is the only non-apple device I have so I can try to use it in this manner.

The Lumia 950/XL were the last hurrah for the platform, so one can hardly blame Continuum for the demise of Windows on phones.

"Microsoft tried this with Continuum for Windows 8/10 and Windows Mobile, it failed."

There are plenty of reasons for that, chief among them being the staggeringly-uphill battle of Windows regaining any significant marketshare in the mobile space and (presumably) the lack of software compatible with Windows on ARM.

Meanwhile, Android (and Samsung's phones in particular) are quite popular, and the vast majority (to my knowledge) of Linux desktop programs work on ARM just as well as they do on x86(-64).

You can't discount the confused product strategy re: old software in this failure.

People want desktops to run desktop software. Not WinRT/universal/modern/UWP. They did not understand this. So for multiple iterations, they shipped tablets, phones, etc., under the "Windows" brand that could not do what people think of when they hear "Windows".

They should have shipped a device circa 2012 that let you recompile desktop Windows apps for arm. They had the technology.

Just like with the Ubuntu Phone: we just wanted a regular X11 on the phone, not a copy of Android app space on Android base.

Nokia N900 had regular X and a forked Gtk+. I liked that thing. They didn't really support it well. Then Elop came.

We should not forget the weight of the board on his decisions.

It's not that Continuum failed. It's that Windows Mobile failed as a platform (for other unrelated reasons), so we didn't even get to the point where Continuum was even a realistic consideration.

The whole point on Dex is that you can connect a phone to a big screen and a big keyboard. Well, maybe your clients will provide you with a decent screen and a decent keyboard. (If I were a consultant, I'd pack my own. At this point lugging a laptop starts to make sense.)

Bluetooth keyboard/mouse plus a USB-C to HDMI dongle would enable you to work in any conference room with a display available.

oh yeah, I'd hate to be stuck on a Thinkpad or and XPS machine, the 2 best laptops on the market.

> oh yeah, I'd hate to be stuck on a Thinkpad or and XPS machine, the 2 best laptops on the market.

Even when Excel , Chrome , Gmail take 30-50 seconds to open up ? And your laptop freezes when you are dealing with more than 10000 rows ?

That's your opinion i guess.

I won't hope that a phone would handle 10000 rows much better.

But that "Excel" thing might be an answer: the laptop must be running Windows, and Windows users often run an antivirus, and some Windows antivirus software is known to be terrible. (The MS-provided basic antivirus was always fine in this regard, though.)

Cortana (well, search indexing) also really hurts performance. They're both disk I/O heavy services and make the whole machine sluggish imo

Turn Cortana off.

I've tried disabling the Search Index Service a few times only to find that it's restarted itself.

>I won't hope that a phone would handle 10000 rows much better.

Galaxy S9 has 2 X 4 Core @ 2GHZ , my corporate laptop has an i5 from 2015 with 2 @ 2GHZ.

I'll go with the Galaxy.

x86 GHz != ARM GHz

Well, GHz is GigaHerzs or 10^9 cycles/second.

So Ghz is Ghz regardless of x86 or ARM as thisvis just the clock speed.

Another discussion is how much work is done each cycle. For that you might use GigaFLOPS or TeraFLOPS (10^9 or 10^12 dloating operations per second) or another absolute measure of performance.

Yet that i5 will be way faster than whatever ARM is in Galaxy. It will also have much faster SSD than the eMMC in phones, and will be paired with faster RAM to boot.

All these things take way more energy, so your laptop will also have much bigger battery.

The phone with 4G will not be subjected to stupid corporate firewall rules preventing access to, say, StackOverflow.

I guess they like hiring more devs to do less work.

Some exception cases: the phone needs to run a Mobile device management agent that installs and launches an antivirus, or the mobile happens to connect to a corporate VPN that routes all traffic and then inspects it via some appliance.

I'd just activate the hotspot on the phone to use the laptop.

Unless your phone was issued by your employer, is managed by MDM and runs all the traffic through your employers firewall anyway.

On the other hand, there are laptops, that have cellular radios. My old Thinkpad surely does.

Frankly, 10k rows is something that an IBM PC from 1985 should have handled adequately, using SuperCalc.

Depends on what you're doing with these 10k rows, though.

FYI GHZ isn't a good indicator of performance difference between 2 different types, models, and architecture;

it's like comparing the revs of your cars, it's just the cycle rate, not the Instruction rate

Indeed one of the biggest drains on corporate productivity are unaccountable bully IT departments. I recently quit a job because I wasn't allowed to escape aggressive antivirus software that made compilation insufferable.

> I recently quit a job because I wasn't allowed to escape aggressive antivirus software that made compilation insufferable.

This seems a drastic response.

Why would running these things on your phone be faster?

If Chrome takes 30-50 seconds to open and your computer was made in the past ten years, you should probably reformat

What did they do to that poor computer? On my 3 year old Thinkpad Chrome/Firefox take < 1sec to start and Gmail takes a couple seconds to load. Can't talk Excel as I don't use it.

The recipe is quite simple:

1. Take a nice shiny new laptop

2. Install Windows onto it.

3. Throw a large bucket of badly written monitoring apps, security apps, encryption apps, in-house apps, and pointless business notification apps.

4. Lock down the OS so the end-user can't remove or stop any of the added chaff.

5. Watch the nice shiny new laptop slow to crawl under the weight of all that crapware.

This is speaking from experience - I have 10+ years of designing and deploying corporate Windows based Desktop/Laptop builds. It all starts fine, until some clueless internal committee decide that they want to install everything and the kitchen sink onto your nicely designed platform...

DeX open the (back)door to (a big cucumber, sorry for being vulgar) port free software to proprietary jail and let users think they are free.

A jail's a jail, no matter how big, decorated and comfortable seems to be.

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