Universal Android Laptop Dock: Microsoft Nightmare, Or Toy?

ozmanjusri writes with this story from PC World: "A company that makes keyboard docks has announced a laptop-like peripheral that uses smartphones for processing and storage. Since many Android and Apple phones have multi-core processors powerful enough to deliver laptop-level performance, they only lack usable screens and keyboards to be productive for most office work. ClamCase believes their 13.3-inch 1,280 x 720 ClamBook with keyboard, multi-touch touchpad, and dedicated Android keys will make up for the lack, and turn smartphones into fully-functional laptops. A device like the ClamBook could be a real game-changer for the computer industry. If it succeeds, peripheral makers could build docks which would allow any monitor, keyboard, mouse and storage to be powered by any Android phone. It's a combination which would make BYOD offices very tempting for the corporations who are the Windows/Office combination's remaining cash-cow." I only wish the company would license the idea as well to established makers, so otherwise conventional laptops could gain the ability to easily become advanced phone screens, too.

Comments

It's the apps, stupid!

[hackertourist]

they only lack

No, there's much more missing than just the large screen and keyboard: Office applications, for one. A web browser is not enough.

And as we've just seen in the /. stories discussing Windows 8, a mobile UI is NOT a good idea for a laptop/desktop.

Re:It's the apps, stupid!

[Simon Brooke]

The reason no-one has yet bothered to port decent office apps to Android is the lack of a keyboard and decent display. If these things catch on (and, provided it was enough cheaper than an Asus Transformer, I'd certainly buy one), then the apps will come.

The first computer I worked on, an ICL 1902, had 8K 32-bit words of core storage, which is to say the equivalent of 32Kb of RAM. It ran at about quarter of a million instructions per second. It supported 18 simultaneous users on teletypes (proper teletypes, with paper rolls, not these new fangled 'glass teletype' things). Later on in life, I was responsible for one single Intel 80486

box (66 million instructions per second, and if I recall correctly about 64Mb of RAM) running UNIX System V.4, which supported a typing pool of thirty typists all doing word-processing on dumb terminals, and five accountants mostly using spreadsheets also on dumb terminals.

My HTC One X runs at 6 Billion instructions per second. OK, they're RISC instructions so you can maybe half that to get a comparable number, but even so... It has 2Gb of RAM. It is five orders of magnitude faster than that ICL 1902, two orders of magnitude faster the 486. The idea that the phone in your pocket isn't a sufficiently powerful computer to support one user doing ordinary office tasks is simply silly. What's been lacking up to now is a convenient user interface for office tasks. Devices like this solve that problem.

Build it, and they will come.

Fucking stupid - processors + storage are cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

What a fucking stupid idea - the processor + storage are the CHEAP part of the phone. Now instead of having a phone + a laptop, you wind up with a phone + a lobotomized laptop that doesn't work without the phone, at a cost that's close to that of the complete set...

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[EasyTarget]

Same criticism was levelled at IDE, PCI and USB, hell even at VHS..

Yet their ubiquity means they were used extensively for years, while 'superior' alternatives have come and gone and are almost forgotten now. It takes a real change of technology to obsolete them (like DVD did for VHS, or SATA for IDE).

HDMI is simple, convenient, bundled into most production chipsets and works well for normal folks, it will be around for ages, deal with it.