9 ms·

Getting closer... I really think a smartphone docking into stations is the future. "Mannequin" Laptops, desktops etc that are activated once a smartphone is p

by Casc 14y ago

Getting closer... I really think a smartphone docking into stations is the future. "Mannequin" Laptops, desktops etc that are activated once a smartphone is plugged in. You can now use a keyboard, external monitors, your OS slightly adapts... iOS becomes Snow Leopard (not exactly, you just have more functionality) Once docked, a smartphone can unlock additional cores that would otherwise consume too much power, activate a more powerful GPU, possibly one even housed in the docking station itself... I really think smart phones will become the magical little chip you place inside a cyborg to operate a larger, more powerful creature. Imagine working at home off your docked smartphone computer (fully functioning OS), undocking and using your simple apps on the train to work (mobile OS, not much different than current experience), getting to work, docking into your station and you're right back at it (full OS)... portability with a familiar ui/ux feel... seamless experience. Or gaming at home, undocking and going to a LAN party with your friends, not having to worry about whether or not the games / apps are installed, the docks are generic... plug and play. (Ignoring the whole home to work aspect and security issues / work policies, of course) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3902051 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3902051

cageface 14y ago
Apple's newfound fortune was built on the understanding that mobile computing is fundamentally different than desktop/laptop computing. That understanding is the reason they were able to break touch screen interfaces into the mainstream. Steve Jobs is laughing in his grave at stuff like this.
- alttab 14y ago
  Form factor is just the topping. Using web apps and cloud storage is so far the most accessible way to have a seamless computing environment (versus experience, which must be different like Jobs knew). Apple or anyone else could side step those entire industries by making powerful portable smart phones that acted as a driver or data storage for other operating environments.
  - Casc 14y ago
    Yes. This is exactly how I feel. Let the phone drive the data/storage. The dock/mode/inputs are all situational. Mobile will still be a mobile experience, desktop a desktop, the phone can even slide into a damn tablet... But the same mobile device is the little chip inside the cyborg.
  - drivingmenuts 14y ago
    None of that solves the problem of being vulnerable to issues in the cloud, though. There are about 10 billion things that have to work correctly for your data to be accessible and safe and only 1 or 2 things that have to go wrong for it to be gone forever.
    - mayanksinghal 14y ago
      Which is true for local storage as well. If fact, I will argue that data on cloud is more reliable than data on my local machine. I carry it all the time, I don't have back up for a large part of it (I use versioning for code, everything else is painful); I did have some backups on external storage devices but they are more prone to faults and crashes than my internal drives. Carrying such devices around is a major hassle - actively taking backups is an even bigger task!
- Casc 14y ago
  I'm not suggesting they need to be fundamentally the same. Apple has taken steps to give iOS and OSx some key similarities in look and feel, the lines don't need to be blurred any further, in fact for this concept to be successful, I don't think they should.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    People are taking you awfully literally here. I think the idea of only having to ever configure and trust 1 device is fantastic. I guess people are thinking of the integration that is available today and how awkward it is, rather than the integration that can happen when everything ships with support for working with everything else. Sure the software needed at the center of it doesn't exist, but there isn't any fundamental limitation on presenting device appropriate interfaces, it's just integration work.
    - Casc 14y ago
      I'd have to agree. I really don't believe a company like Apple would be more than five years away from being able to do something like this, either... Provided they wanted to, of course. It still may be too soon, and I'm certainly not thinking the device in the linked article is the solution, but there are a lot of possibilities here.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Possibly, a few issues though: Hardware is getting cheaper , for example the $25 raspberry pi computer. It will become likely that peripherals like the screen , case and keyboard will be more expensive than the actual computer itself (especially if the CPU etc are smartphone grade stuff). If you have additional hardware inside your phone that is unlocked only when it is plugged into a docking station, then why are you carrying that extra hardware around in your pocket the whole time? Why not just put a very fast GPU inside the docking station for example and have some sort of high speed bus. If you are making 2 versions of the same application with different UIs then that is really very similar to making 2 applications. Sure you can do a lot of code re-use, but this is possible anyway even when you are programming for separate devices. Portable things like phones get easily lost of broken, imagine losing your smartphone and being basically unable to do anything until you replace it because there is no such thing as a "fat terminal" anymore. Businesses are probably going to prefer bolted down systems (physically and in terms of software) that employees do not take home with them. The internet makes this sort of a moot issue anyway, because if most of your applications are SaaS and all of your data is stored on a server anyway then anything with a web browser can become a dumb terminal, there is no need for your own hardware.
- Casc 14y ago
  I don't think all applications will work cross dock.. Some sure, all no. And in regards to housing the GPU inside dock, thats exactly what I was thinking. I believe you may have missed: "Once docked, a smartphone can unlock additional cores that would otherwise consume too much power, activate a more powerful GPU, possibly one even housed in the docking station itself..."
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I missed the part about the docking station and assumed you meant inside the phone, sorry. Once you have put the GPU inside the docking station though, people will start to say "hmm, why not put a faster CPU in there too" "oh, and a bigger SSD so we can cache more stuff" at which point the phone starts to become redundant. As with all of these things , I imagine it will be cyclical.
89a 14y ago
"I really think smart phones will become the magical little chip you place inside a cyborg to operate a larger, more powerful creature." Why though? To save the screen having a processor behind it?
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Ubuntu for Android does this.
hosh 14y ago
I agree. It won't just be what you do in the office either. Modularity like this would help speed up iterations in car nav technology. (Why should GPS units be so tightly coupled with the display tech? Why did it take several years after the first iphone before we saw multi-touch GPSs? Shouldn't I be able to upgrade the voice command module in an older-generation car?) I like what Peter F. Hamilton imagined in his Commonwealth Saga. Your personal computer expands out to available resources as you move from place to place.
pbreit 14y ago
I used to think that but now I think it will be delivered via the cloud. Integrating software is much easier than integrating hardware.
- vidarh 14y ago
  The "cloud" is still ultimately hardware. And it'd be much nicer if a good chunk of that hardware is light enough to be carried around in my pocket so I don't have to deal with network outages or latency issues, and instead have it form it's own little mini-cloud with nearby devices combined with synchronizing to more remote large scale cloud services to safe keep my data. That's already sort of here: My data exists with external providers but is nearly all backed up to my home server, which serves my set top box, and serves as a backup point for my phone and laptop (before shuffling the data on to external backup), and my phone can tell my home server to push a movie to my TV via my set top box using DLNA, or my laptop can push it to my phone. Or my phone to my TV. Or any of them can pull it straight from the file server. No "hardware integration" necessary other than the networking and power supply.

by Casc 14y ago

cageface 14y ago

Apple's newfound fortune was built on the understanding that mobile computing is fundamentally different than desktop/laptop computing. That understanding is the reason they were able to break touch screen interfaces into the mainstream. Steve Jobs is laughing in his grave at stuff like this.

alttab 14y ago
Form factor is just the topping. Using web apps and cloud storage is so far the most accessible way to have a seamless computing environment (versus experience, which must be different like Jobs knew). Apple or anyone else could side step those entire industries by making powerful portable smart phones that acted as a driver or data storage for other operating environments.
- Casc 14y ago
  Yes. This is exactly how I feel. Let the phone drive the data/storage. The dock/mode/inputs are all situational. Mobile will still be a mobile experience, desktop a desktop, the phone can even slide into a damn tablet... But the same mobile device is the little chip inside the cyborg.
- drivingmenuts 14y ago
  None of that solves the problem of being vulnerable to issues in the cloud, though. There are about 10 billion things that have to work correctly for your data to be accessible and safe and only 1 or 2 things that have to go wrong for it to be gone forever.
  - mayanksinghal 14y ago
    Which is true for local storage as well. If fact, I will argue that data on cloud is more reliable than data on my local machine. I carry it all the time, I don't have back up for a large part of it (I use versioning for code, everything else is painful); I did have some backups on external storage devices but they are more prone to faults and crashes than my internal drives. Carrying such devices around is a major hassle - actively taking backups is an even bigger task!
Casc 14y ago
I'm not suggesting they need to be fundamentally the same. Apple has taken steps to give iOS and OSx some key similarities in look and feel, the lines don't need to be blurred any further, in fact for this concept to be successful, I don't think they should.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  People are taking you awfully literally here. I think the idea of only having to ever configure and trust 1 device is fantastic. I guess people are thinking of the integration that is available today and how awkward it is, rather than the integration that can happen when everything ships with support for working with everything else. Sure the software needed at the center of it doesn't exist, but there isn't any fundamental limitation on presenting device appropriate interfaces, it's just integration work.
  - Casc 14y ago
    I'd have to agree. I really don't believe a company like Apple would be more than five years away from being able to do something like this, either... Provided they wanted to, of course. It still may be too soon, and I'm certainly not thinking the device in the linked article is the solution, but there are a lot of possibilities here.

jiggy2011 14y ago

Possibly, a few issues though: Hardware is getting cheaper , for example the $25 raspberry pi computer. It will become likely that peripherals like the screen , case and keyboard will be more expensive than the actual computer itself (especially if the CPU etc are smartphone grade stuff). If you have additional hardware inside your phone that is unlocked only when it is plugged into a docking station, then why are you carrying that extra hardware around in your pocket the whole time? Why not just put a very fast GPU inside the docking station for example and have some sort of high speed bus. If you are making 2 versions of the same application with different UIs then that is really very similar to making 2 applications. Sure you can do a lot of code re-use, but this is possible anyway even when you are programming for separate devices. Portable things like phones get easily lost of broken, imagine losing your smartphone and being basically unable to do anything until you replace it because there is no such thing as a "fat terminal" anymore. Businesses are probably going to prefer bolted down systems (physically and in terms of software) that employees do not take home with them. The internet makes this sort of a moot issue anyway, because if most of your applications are SaaS and all of your data is stored on a server anyway then anything with a web browser can become a dumb terminal, there is no need for your own hardware.

Casc 14y ago
I don't think all applications will work cross dock.. Some sure, all no. And in regards to housing the GPU inside dock, thats exactly what I was thinking. I believe you may have missed: "Once docked, a smartphone can unlock additional cores that would otherwise consume too much power, activate a more powerful GPU, possibly one even housed in the docking station itself..."
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I missed the part about the docking station and assumed you meant inside the phone, sorry. Once you have put the GPU inside the docking station though, people will start to say "hmm, why not put a faster CPU in there too" "oh, and a bigger SSD so we can cache more stuff" at which point the phone starts to become redundant. As with all of these things , I imagine it will be cyclical.

89a 14y ago

"I really think smart phones will become the magical little chip you place inside a cyborg to operate a larger, more powerful creature." Why though? To save the screen having a processor behind it?

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Ubuntu for Android does this.

hosh 14y ago

I agree. It won't just be what you do in the office either. Modularity like this would help speed up iterations in car nav technology. (Why should GPS units be so tightly coupled with the display tech? Why did it take several years after the first iphone before we saw multi-touch GPSs? Shouldn't I be able to upgrade the voice command module in an older-generation car?) I like what Peter F. Hamilton imagined in his Commonwealth Saga. Your personal computer expands out to available resources as you move from place to place.

pbreit 14y ago

I used to think that but now I think it will be delivered via the cloud. Integrating software is much easier than integrating hardware.

vidarh 14y ago
The "cloud" is still ultimately hardware. And it'd be much nicer if a good chunk of that hardware is light enough to be carried around in my pocket so I don't have to deal with network outages or latency issues, and instead have it form it's own little mini-cloud with nearby devices combined with synchronizing to more remote large scale cloud services to safe keep my data. That's already sort of here: My data exists with external providers but is nearly all backed up to my home server, which serves my set top box, and serves as a backup point for my phone and laptop (before shuffling the data on to external backup), and my phone can tell my home server to push a movie to my TV via my set top box using DLNA, or my laptop can push it to my phone. Or my phone to my TV. Or any of them can pull it straight from the file server. No "hardware integration" necessary other than the networking and power supply.