Hacker News Reader

Comment by FloatArtifact | Hacker News Reader

There's simply no real reason that a mobile device can't function as a desktop from a technical level either in software or hardware. Simply dock your phone or it could be even wireless. Boom! Go from mobile experience to desktop experience. It seems they want to cram the mobile experience into a traditional desktop environment (mouse and keyboard driven with windows paradigm). IOS and Android have not embraced desktop paradigm. We simply need a unified SDK to support both experiences and the store downloads the appropriate assets. We're beginning to see somewhat of these concepts with foldables phone coming into the market.

View on HN

I'm browsing from a Pixel 9 phone running GraphenOS phone, plugged into a 4K monitor, and paired with a bluetooth Logitech MX Vertical mouse and a MX Keys Mini keyboard. Works prefect. I don't miss my Macbook Air M5 much.

This is my dream, just waiting for the motorola with a stronger cpu/gpu and hopefully greater than 1080p resolution from AOSP Desktop Mode.

Apple having shown that the same CPU they use in some iPhones and iPads, Apple A18 Pro, worked perfectly well to build a laptop around running macOS, the MacBook Neo, should take the logical next leap in making an iPhone/laptop blend.

Make an iPhone and corresponding docking station, where the docking station is a MacBook shell + screen + touchpad + keyboard + battery that you slot the iPhone into in order to use the iPhone as a laptop. The slot you push the iPhone into would be reminiscent of the PCMCIA slots of old, but having the dimensions of the iPhone and connecting via ThunderBolt 5. When slotted into the shell, no part of the iPhone will extend outside of the shell. To eject, you push it in slightly and it pops out same way you push on a microSD card to eject it from many devices.

I would very much like one of those, and have done for years. Like the old PowerBook Duos, where you slotted the laptop into a docking station for extra ports, graphics etc.

Maybe they could call it an iPhone Duo. Oh wait…

That's sort of the point of the Googlebooks. They run Android internally, and then to get Android to support Googlebooks, they had to add/improve things like multi-window support, very large monitors, keyboards, mouse support, etc.

If you have a USB dock that your keyboard/mouse/display is plugged in to, you should be able to stick it in your Pixel phone's USB jack and get a desktop experience. Some of my team would actually test keyboard support that way, by plugging a keyboard into a tablet.

Yeah, but why can't this be just stock part of Android? We should not need a separate OS or device to have this kind of experience.

Android actually does have a desktop mode when you connect an external display. I'm not sure how much this is standardized / merged into AOSP, but I use it with my stock Pixel 10 Pro.

I would describe the experience as... passable. Historically it was quite glitchy but recent OS updates have improved it. The biggest issues resolve around apps which do not scale their UIs correctly.

It is a stock part of Android. You can plug your Android phone into an external display and you'll get an experience like the Googlebook.

From what I read that's the entire point of the whole Googlebook replacing Chromebook thing. The whole desktop is based on Android so all android phone and tablet apps are native. Naturally there will be SDK changes as some apps release versions optimized for desktop.

Google probably wants it so they can extend their app store empire to desktop apps and games.

Samsung DEX is basically this you can turn your phone into a desktop

Ubuntu tried that at some point, but it never took off as a mobile OS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com