USB Stick Contains Dual-Core Computer, Turns Any Screen Into an Android Station | Hacker News Reader

USB Stick Contains Dual-Core Computer, Turns Any Screen Into an Android Station

blog.laptopmag.com

408 pointstilt74 comments

Here's the major thing that got me, when you plug it into a computer via usb, you can run the OS in it's own window. That's the big get for me. But rather than be this USB device, it should exist as a feature on all our android smart phones.

Someone come up with an APP, that lets me plug my phone into my computer via it's USB cable and then let me have access to the device with my mouse and keyboard as input devices and the screen output directed at a window on my screen.

You can, albeit inefficiently, by installing a VNC server on your phone (e.g. https://market.android.com/details?id=org.onaips.vnc). The downside is that -- today -- this requires rooting your phone.

Here's another option -- http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/ -- I'm not sure how it works. It claims to show the display when non-elevated, but require root send input.

The latter probably uses an adb command to take a screenshot many times a second.

My prediction is that is exactly what we'll be doing in a couple years. Smart phone processors are getting fast enough to be a primary computer for the average user. Why have separate devices when a smart phone and an external monitor/keyboard is all you need?

The atrix was the first phone that recognized that use case - but the suits at motorola made it prohibitively expensive to own the dock (costed as much as the phone itself) that made this possible.

Here's the problem I see - the docking system that needs to be standardized. The ARM Mali T658 GPU promises PS3 quality... and there are better chips (Tegra 4, Adreno, etc.) on the way. The Atrix leverages the HDMI+microusb because of the way it designed them to fit into the slots into its dock.

Theoretically, you could use the Adreno dock with other phones, but they dont have the ports placed in the same way (to lock into the dock).

I think with Google's philosophy of open-ness, it is too much to expect the creation of a new dock standard. I'm not sure if HDMI (or the displayport equivalents) can carry serialized mouse signals in addition to display... but somehow the ports need to be standardized before we have a hope of leveraging hardware that will be equipped to play Crysis by 2012.

And that will be a shame - all that power and unable to use it. Almost as frustrating Skype not using most Android phones' front camera towards video calls for a long time.

IBM had a demo of something like this about 10 years ago IIRC, where you dropped your PDA into a dock and your session/files were instantly available.

Steve jobs also talked about this in a round table at an WWDC where he talked about having access to "home" anywhere you went. this became iCloud. probably for apple the step holding up the process is that it cuts out the beloved Mac in the middle. a thunderbolt display powered by iphone or iPad could be insanely great

http://carlos.bueno.org/2009/11/ycombinators-rfs-5-accidenta...

This is sort of what the Motorola Atrix does.

This is where I see the operating system going: a combo of carrying something with you for physical authorization and dumb terminals that load whatever you need, where you need (whether from the net or you've got it with you on a device). Exciting times to see something like this.

If something like that would be common enough, I bet we'd get something like phone booths again, providing better in- and output (large screen, camera) plus privacy.

While I 100% support that idea (because it's awesome), I somehow doubt the mainstream would use something like this.

If you don't believe me, go explain this to your parents or someone who doesn't read tech blogs, and let us know how that conversation goes.

I think there would definitely be a market for something like that (I want this USB stick for instance), but I don't think operating systems as a whole are going in that way.

Even with the rise of the Cloud, there are a lot of things that for various reasons are best handled by at least a fat client if not a full-blown PC with its own OS and processing power.

Sure, right now. But I've stopped lugging my laptop around when visiting friends or offices, because on the browser I have gmail, text editors, gdocs, ssh terminals .. almost everything I do outside of media editing I can do anywhere as long as I have my access credentials with me (thanks dropbox) and the internet. I think there'll be a place for a long time for dedicated professional machines - just like there's a place for dedicated servers but many services run great on a VPS. While we'll carry laptops/netbooks with us for some time to come I won't be surprised the day my kids come home with something that doesn't require ownership of their very own hardware, just some kind of authorization module.

I'm sure many of us have been in the position before when an emergency comes up and you ssh in remotely. All I really need to work is a smartphone, screen and input device and I'm comfortably working anywhere.

That sounds like a nice consistent and less interruptive alternative to a bootable USB stick (not aware of any non-invasive virtualization products).

Considering that you might already carry around an android device, it would be nice to integrate that. Some phones alrady have HDMI ports and would go nicely with "dumb terminal" software like that. In an ideal world, I'd like to use the phone screen as a touch pad and let it project a keyboard (with a tablet, you could use that as both keyboard and mouse, of course).

Android 4.0 would be especially good for this, since it looks better on bigger screens, so once you hook the phone to the bigger screen, it could just show you the same OS, except in "tablet mode" (like the the apps).

Yes, I don't think we need a huge jump in OS capability for something like that. For one, fullscreen apps are pretty common even on desktop machines. Most Windows users I know run like that pretty much all the time, and OS X Lion seems to go that way, too. Apps that need finer grained control often are perfectly fine doing it themselves, e.g. a terminal application with split screes – or simply using screen/tmux.

If the OS would support some primitive tiling (mostly to have two apps side by side on a full HD class display), I'd say that 95% of the people would be happy 95% of the time.

The biggest issue I'd see is app diversity. Some apps might be willing to target all of the devices, some won't. But no matter how perfect your app is on small screens, if it will just scale badly to larger ones, people will complain. There would probably be a need for some finer-grained selection in the app launcher, clearly labeling what would be fine to use now and what not.

How soon will Android phones have this capability? For many people, all their data is already on their phones anyways and they're always carrying their phones, so this is just an additional widget to carry. The PC part of this widget just seems like software, and some Android phones already have an HDMI port...

It looks really sweet. Here's the company website:

http://www.fxitech.com/products/

Connection error, but this is the same thing I believe http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/17/fxis-cotton-candy-could-t...

Fun concept. Does make me wonder about ChromeOS, though- everyone is going to Android, even for full computer devices. I don't blame them- you can install apps and do all sorts with Android, wheras ChromeOS is just a glorified browser.

Taking bets on when Google mothball ChromeOS for good.

Everything is in the browser is still the (long) way to go, I think. On my android90% use is browser.

Remove apps from Android and you get chrome os.

Screen and battery tech advances at a slower rate than silicon (CPU, GPU, RAM).

By physically separating those aspects into different devices, users could upgrade just the part that needs upgrading. i.e. this 21g device, and a "dumb" smartphone shell.

I'm not sure we're at quite the level of modularity that would allow that yet. For example in a smart phone, RF design is a big issue (antennae efficiency / avoiding interference), which may preclude making the baseband component swappable (which is one component we still seem to be iterating).

There's also the issue of designing a compact form factor that wouldn't result in huge space inefficiencies within the phone. Maybe in another 10 years

I wonder why they went for Android instead of some light Linux distro. Not sure what's the point of having Android on a huge LCD.

Android is a light Linux distro. My coworker next to me has demonstrated running Firefox on it.

I would imagine odds are pretty good you can hack this thing to put your choice of distro on it in the end.

Except you can't really run Linux apps on it easily, since most of them will want X, or at least the GNU libc--and Android has neither. It's a pain in the ass.

it goes both ways - if you put linux on it, it doesn't have dalvik or whatever it is that android apps need to run. not everybody wants to run X apps, what's a pain in the ass for you is a great feature for somebody else.

Certainly--but someone buying an Android device thinking "it runs Linux" would probably be disappointed. Linux is there, but from the perspective of the average user it might as well be a custom kernel or even the Windows kernel, because without "surgery" and tweaking, you'll only be running applications built for the Android stack.

I've chopped out the Java layers of Android and run my own software on there, but it took some work to get my application running with the Bionic libc and the Android-specific devices.

People's perspectives are interesting. For me most Linux apps means command lines and daemons. X is rarely wanted ;) but yeah GNU libc and rest of shell "runtime" I would be very sad without.

They said it also runs Ubuntu, and will run the Windows 8 ARM version. Android is good for a low power CPU like ARM since it doesn't require as much horsepower. I would imagine that running a Firefox browser on Ubuntu under ARM would be a pretty painful experience compared to running Android.

FWIIW, I have a Marvell OpenRD[1] system running a "normal" RedHat XWindows environment (have not had a chance to switch it to Ubuntu/Debian yet). It runs great, including firefox.

[1] http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-openrdudetails.aspx

How painful was this to get? The website looks a bit schlocky but I am intrigued.

I got it over a year ago so my memory is fuzzy. IIRC, I got it directly from Marvell as an eval board. My employer actually bought it - I gave the purchaser the web site link and it showed up a week or so later.

There are lots of possibilities between Android and Ubuntu, Lubuntu[1], for example. Also, there's a bunch of Webkit based browsers in Linux ecosystem, no need to push it with Firefox at all. Even something like Puppy Linux[2] would be more useful than Android IMO.

[1] http://lubuntu.net/ [2] http://puppylinux.org/

> Android is good for a low power CPU like ARM since it doesn't require as much horsepower

What are you basing this on?

I guess if that LCD can handle touch then it'll be just a big tablet where Android is more useful.

IIRC HDMI is one-way and touch-screens send touch information back via USB or some other connector. I can't see any wording in the specs that implies this has USB host capability, so unless I'm wrong there it it wouldn't be able to doe touch that way.

You could do it over bluetooth, but at this point you're making a specialized display and you may as well just plug into the Cotton Candies USB port to both power it and pass in the touch screen HID data.

The HDMI connector has I2C on there. You could use that to communicate with a touchscreen and other peripherals. Since the display acts a slave only you would need to actively poll the screen all the time for touch events, but it's not that much overhead.

You could send back touch events over the HDMI audio return or Ethernet channels.

Too bad HDMI seems to only spec 5V @ 55mA.

I had dreams of just plugging this stick into an HDMI port (TV, monitor, whatever) and having an instant PC. Sadly, it needs external power.

Doesnt HDMI v1.4 have Ethernet built in? Surely you could figure out some PoE deal...

PoE explicitly only works over Cat5+ cable (although I think there's a low-power version for Cat3). HDMI obviously doesn't have the same physical-layer properties as Cat5, even if you're passing the same Ethernet frames on top.

If your TV has a USB port (mine does, and is in no way state of the art) you should be able to power it from that. Not quite a zero cable solution, but it's close.

So on one end you plug in the HDMI, and the other end you need a female->male cable to power the USB? Just asking for clarification.

I think that's the idea, although you could do it either way:

-Plug it directly into the USB port and use cable+adapter to connect to HDMI.

-Plug it directly into the HDMI port and use cable+adapter to connect to USB.

Actually, a third way would be to use cables on both ends, but that just seems kind of silly.

Any reason it couldn't plug into this and then directly into the TV with an HDMI cable? http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB352LL/C

They can be bought for cheaper elsewhere online.

I dub it the "reach around pc" when it is plugged into TV on both ends, otherwise it's just like a guru/shiva/dream plug. http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com

Interesting, but note that the writer didn't get a chance to actually use it, just saw it boot up the Android environment in a window on the laptop. So, it could be great, or it could be unusable. Also the company aren't selling direct, they're hoping for someone else to pick it up and turn it in to a real product we could buy.

So, interesting, quite advanced concept, but I'd be more interested when I can buy one than it's current state.

How does this compare against RaspberryPi? I've been waiting for that for months, has this beaten it to the punch?

To be fair, there's a big difference in constraint between $200 and $25...

Target for this is end of next year so afaik the raspberry pi will beat it to retail. This device is significantly more powerful, smaller (if that image is accurate), and as mentioned, 8 times the price.

Not quite the same, but Microsoft is doing 'Windows To Go' for Windows 8. Might be neat if it integrated with the phone somehow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go

When you plug the Cotton Candy into a Mac or PC, the Windows or OS X operating system recognizes it as a USB drive. You can then launch the software and run the Cotton Candy’s Android environment in a secure window...

Wouldn't this still be vulnerable to key loggers and screen capturing spyware?

wouldn't everything be? secure doesn't mean 100% no possible way that an attacker could ever compromise anything. it's also vulnerable to people looking over your shoulder.

What I mean is, it doesn't provide much of an advantage over just using the hotel lobby computer with your data on a USB flash drive. Connecting it directly to a monitor via HDMI, on the other hand, does seem quite useful.

Has the Android emulator gotten any better? If not, this may be a must have for some Android devs

Depends on the cost. If it's much more than $350 then it's probably cheaper to find a phone or tablet on ebay.

Considering RaspberryPi is building this for $25, for these guys' sake it better not cost $350!!!

You are comparing apples to oranges there though: the specs are significantly different:

* more powerful CPU (or at very least the same design at a higher speed, 1200MHz rather than 700) * more powerful GPU (both can play back 1080p OK, but the GPU can be used for much more than just movie playback acceleration) * more RAM (1024Mb on the CC, 256 on the RP(B), 128 on the RP(A)) * wireless networking via 802.11b/g/n and/or Bluetooth (the rp will need a USB device plugged in to do either of these) * the thing the RP has that these don't are wired networking built-in (and then, only on the slightly more expensive model B) and USB ports (it looks like the CC will operate as a USB MSD but I can't see any wording in the descriptions that suggest it can act as a host for USB devices)

I plan to grab at least on RP (the planned-to-be-$35 model B) when they turn up as the spec and the price combine to make it irresistible as a techie toy, but what you get for the extra cost of the CC (the target is $200, not $350) is considerable extra power and built-in wireless options. Depending on your needs this price-for-performance might be a good deal, though the Pi should do admirably for what I plan to play with.

Apparently the target cost is $200.

Or you could buy an 8 gb USB stick for $10, load your favorite Linux distro on it using Universal USB installer or unetbootin, load all your fav software, make a separate partition for your own data, and then use the host machine's processor to run it, which will almost certainly be more powerful than a dual core 1.2 GHz ARM device. You could even encrypt the drive for privacy. All for the cost of two Starbucks double lattes.

And you could do the same thing using another open source OS other than Linux, and without an installer or unetbootin.

The cost is the stick and the time to learn about some simple low level concepts.

Why wait for some company to deliver a solution to you? DIY.

This would be fantastic for working with encrypted data in a secure way.

Up to a point. Someone interested in monitoring what you do could still capture the display data and the data transmitted from whatever input devices you use. This is especially true if you plug this into a computer of uncertain provenance, but still potentially true for a monitor, TV, etc.

It definitely seems like an improvement in security over just booting or running a VM from a secure flash drive, though.

specs http://www.fxitech.com/products/

Can't read; get endless hover ad.

There's a "Click to skip" in the upper right hand corner.

wfm, I'm using Chrome and Adblock Plus.

It's brutal (but yeah, 'click to skip' upper right)... I really wanted to share this article, but the number of ads on the page is so crippling that I was embarrassed to send anyone there.

shut up and take my money

vs. RasberryPi?

Nvidia has a patent filled for this type of USB computer, I wonder if they infringed in anyway.

I like this product a lot, I may buy it when it becomes available. However, for people who have a MHL smartphone and MHL TV, there is no need for the Cotton Candy, as they just need to buy a cable for the same functionalities.

definitely interesting stuff

I have no use for this but I want it so bad it hurts. This is a truly an amazing gadget.

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