I want the Nintendo Switch of phones. I want to seamlessly walk off with it or put it into a dock and Bam, full desktop OS. But a good one. Not the janky answers that usually get posted in reply.
Never happened, and instead we got 19 flavors of "cloud sync", which doesn't solve the problem and has nasty security implications.
I still want my portable ~home.
A high quality flash drive[2] boots up instantly and loads apps instantly. I can't work on a 3" screen and don't want to carry around anything any bigger. So for me this is a better solution than a docking station for my phone.
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_Arch_Linux_o...
[2] https://shop.sandisk.com/store/sdiskus/en_US/pd/productID.52...
Also, in the case of public computers, the risk of keyloggers means you cannot trust the computer even if you boot your own OS.
> risk of keyloggers means even if you boot your own OS.
While it's likely the OS of some of the machines I used were infected, the odds of them carrying firmware based backdoors was not a concern. The odds of getting dengue fever were far more likely than a hardware level hack. Those attacks are very hardware specific limiting the potential for widespread infection. At the time Snowden was still fresh on my mind. So I was more concerned with the NSA was sucking down all my emails / cloud data. There is only so much you can do.
Had I been using the OS on the cybercafes, I'm sure my risk of getting keylogged would have been 1000x more than using my own OS on their hardware.
How many of their users bring their own OS on a flash drive? In my travels, I only met only 1 other. One. He was running Tails. And as I said the chains with their management software and BIOS lockdown don't even allow this. So we're talking mom and pop cafes.
Now do you think those small time owners are going to spend their money to add this additional cost to spy on that one traveler who has his own OS? That make zero sense when they already control the OS and network. So much easier to spy on customers on that level. In that case, VPN + my own OS circumvents them.
Your paranoia only makes sense if I was going to DEF CON or some kind of a target of state level spying.
This would still be the case if you put Windows 10 desktop on a phone. The problem is that even though the Windows desktop has a healthy app ecosystem, these apps work poorly on touch devices. This is true for touch devices with large, high-quality screens (various desktops) and for smaller, more portable, but still high-quality screens (like the Surface). Rewriting an app to work well with touch turns out to be an enormous amount of work for the typical Windows app developer. This is true in the ideal case, for C# devs working with WPF/XAML, but it is much worse for devs working with older apps... WinForms, MVC, etc.
Without the desktop apps, you're left with something that is basically an also-ran in a market saturated by iOS and Android. In the meantime, the desktop experience is still not completely touch-friendly and has suffered from a fair amount of design damage in the process (e.g. two control panels). Any developer that would go through the process of getting their existing Windows app working with a touch UI is going to evaluate porting to iOS or Android, and probably prioritize those options.
[Edit]: I should also add that I really want the opposite of what you ask for. I really want my Android apps to also be available on my desktop PC. It would be really cool if I could plug my phone into a clamshell laptop-like device and have a big-screen experience.
Everything is technically complicated on Android, I've also worked into customizing ROMs, trust me, Android kernel & top layer are so clunky that it's even a miracle that the phone is switching on. There's really nothing we can save from this garbage system. Sorry for the Android fans reading this but that's truly my personal opinion after digging into it for a few months. it's just piles and piles of hacks as far as the eye can see.
On the upside, this is still being worked on. The UBports community is still active, and KDE has been refining its plasma mobile interface. Purism's librem 5 should be convergence-capable.
Window toolkits are also being developed to help create responsive applications: Kirigami and libhandy, to name a few.
On the non-opensource front, there is also Microsoft's UWP, and samsung's DeX is showing some promise.
We're getting there, but slower than anticipated. The EOMA68 is also a promising concept, though slightly different, and more similar to what the parent describes.
It was exactly what you describe now.
I am still sad about that.
Found the (ex)-firm: Oqo.
https://www.ft.com/content/5241d778-56d5-11da-b98c-00000e251...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO
https://www.slashgear.com/ces-2009-oqo-model-2-umpc-hands-on...
http://cf9e233f57bd4ae986b3-d4e74cbd2619c9a623339399e96f346b...
How do you imagine this would work even in theory? Running two OSes side-by-side (one when in phone mode, one when in desktop mode?).
Or running two largely incompatible desktop shells with largely incompatible interfaces for multiple apps (touch-optimised programs are very different from mouse-and-keyboard-optimised programs)?
For applications there is lots of work to make it really nice. Putting mobile apps on "desktop" can be done, while user interface will be a bit strange. But that's a thing which needs time. Microsoft tried that by pushing mobile on desktop, but they didn't have the mobile story. Apple has notable Userbase on both.
Userbase has nothing to do with that.
Pros:
* Unlocked OS
* Runs Linux
* Support great camera
* Good gpu; HDMI port
* "Portable"
Cons:
* No cellular radio
* Runs ubuntu
* Have to find a 19.2V battery solution
Sadly WinPho was a distant third in a two-horse race.