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

RaspberryPi + phone?

[Razgorov Prikazka]

And a nice case of course.
I'd rather have a RPi, and a phone to do the phoning.
I just fail to see that this is a "game changer". The steam engine was a game changer IMHO.

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[zoloto]

There is one office I do work for occasionally where some workers have an iPad in a custom stand with a keyboard for all their word processing, email processing, and in(ter/tra)-office instant messaging. Some have a monitor if they prefer a larger display, which many do and some use their iPhones for this as well. Granted this wouldn't work if an office required a piece of proprietary desktop (re: non-mobile) software which many do, sadly. However, I know many offices where this is more than acceptable with decent in-house software apps and web apps.

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[dreamchaser]

I too prefer a discrete, separate phone. That's why I bought an Asus Transformer Prime. It doesn't have 3G/4G so it isn't tied to any carrier and the keyboard dock was made to match it along with dedicated Android keys and an extra battery. It's the best of both worlds from a tablet/laptop standpoint. The rare times I'm not near WiFi I use a portable hotspot which I use anyways so I can get connected on my laptop if I need to bring out the big guns for a work issue. Most of the time when I'm on the road said laptop, which is a huge beast, can stay in the bag because I get all my needs met by the tablet.

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[Sique]

The steam engine was no game changer in itself, first there had to be machines that the steam engine could power like spinning machines and mechanical weaving looms. And it took centuries for the steam engine to mature, given the time from the early attempts (Denis Papin 1690), first patents (Thomas Savery 1698) over the all purpose engines (Thomas Newcomen 1712), the separate condenser (James Watt 1769), the tubular boiler (George Stephenson 1829) and the composite steam engine (Anatole Mallet 1874).

Which of those engines would be the game changer you are referring to?

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[EasyTarget]

"That's way too fiddly for most though"

My phone came with a docking stand with a HDMI out connector on the back, seems straightforward enough.

"requires you have an HDMI capable screen where you want to set down and work, meaning for most applications it is unfeasible outside of the home"

I look at the back of my monitor @work.
HDMI socket
Then I look at the back of my colleagues Monitors (not all the same make/model, but all under 3 years old).
HDMI sockets

HDMI is now so ubiquitous that that argument does not hold water.

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[flyingfsck]

This idea is great until the phone rings...

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[Lumpy]

"Granted this wouldn't work if an office required a piece of proprietary desktop (re: non-mobile) software which many do, sadly."

Only the out of date ones. Even big corps have moved everything to a "web based" or "cloud" setup... yes the cloud is in house, but they love marketing terms.... I heard "Cloud 2.0" being thrown around recently.

Right now, the only people in our office that cant use an ipad or chromebook for their job is Engineering and their need for AutoCad, and Accounting. Oracle has not made a purely web interface to their enterprise accounting systems yet.

But a good 80% of the workforce here, we are looking at moving them to chromebooks.

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.

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[AngryDeuce]

If you are doing ANYTHING that requires a lot of complex math, your phone will get it's butt handed to it's self by a old single core P4 processor.

That's the thing, though, most people aren't doing anything like that. Most people are just using the typical office software suites with some proprietary software thrown in the mix. The computers in many corporate environments are achingly old as it is...a modern mobile device can easily stand up to many of them in practical use.

Obviously this will never be a one-size-fits-all solution, but we're rapidly approaching the point (if not already at that point) where most applications, be it personal media consumption, general office work, whatever, can adequately be performed by a mobile device, and a dock with fully functional peripherals would do more to drive things that way...

The people that need the power of dedicated hardware will still have their beige monstrosities on their desk, but I doubt that's going to be more than 10% of users out there, and with 'The Cloud', we may actually be approaching that point where the computer as we know it is nothing more than a terminal to the real number cruncher's stored down in the basement out of the way.

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[Lumpy]

" works well for normal folks"

You must not use it. It falls out at whim and is easily damaged. IDE,PCI and USB do not suffer from those epic failure points.

and if you think it will be around for ages, you also dont know much... Display Port is rapidly replacing it. HDMI will end up as the shortest lived connector spec out there.

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Yet other times, I carry my pocket projector,

I remember when this used to be called a pocket protector.

Re:RaspberryPi + phone?

[jmorris42]

> This is a model that I've seen as well. Basically all communication-related activities have
> moved to the iPad. The PC is there for heavy lifting...

Isn't this ass backwards? Buy a $500 (but probably a lot more, especially if cell data is involved) iPad and add another few hundred dollars for docks, displays, input devices and licenses for a sack of overpriced apps that can allow it to move from unusable to 'lame' for a desktop user. Lacking a wired network port they MUST suck in a cube farm, especially if remote display of terminal server is involved. Which do you want to run remote display over? Switched GigE or hopelessly overcrowded WiFi. Exactly.

Meanwhile the 'heavy users' run a generic PC that you can buy with display, inputs AND a copy of Office for hundreds less.

This is a vortex of stupid driven by three idiotic notions. One, that Apple (or Android) products are suitable for corporate use. Two, that Apple is pushing hard to get their stuff into the workplace but are unwilling to actually DO anything to compromise their 'perfect' vison of chains for everyone to make it happen, believing their RDF will instead force business to adapt their business practives to Apple instead. Finally, the eternal belief that employees can or should use consumer products in the workplace. Yes they use Windows in both but that is more of the reverse, using a cut down version of a corporate product at home. Which is of course one of the problems with Windows.

The PC (mostly the Apple ][) did break into the corporate world in the opposite way but that was because of epic failures on the part of the old priesthood of IT. The Apple was almost totally unsuitable but since the priesthood left such a huge unfilled need it was used in spite of its limitations. And we fought those limitations in adapting the early PC into the workplace for almost two decades and still fight some today. Name the huge unfulfilled need the iPad satisfies that a PC doesn't? Until somebody answers that question I just don't see it being a productivity enhancer worth reversing the long established trend toward lower TCO per unit productivity in corporate IT.

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!

[Inda]

Google Docs inside my phone's browser works fine, and there are binaries that open word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

I wonder why a dock is needed at all. Bluetooth for the keyboard and mouse. WiFi to send the image to a monitor. All are possible today.

Re:It's the apps, stupid!

[ignavus]

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

My Android tablet - which has its own laptop-style keyboard (it's an Asus Transformer) - comes with an office suite - Polaris.

This is what the netbook should have been - small, lightweight, keyboard ... and Android. The Transformer is all that. Hope they keep making it - or some other vendor picks up the idea.

Re:It's the apps, stupid!

[Vanderhoth]

AIDE works really well as a java IDE/compiler for my HTC Android phone. I also use Google docs for Writing reports and modifying spreadsheets, which works well enough.

Is it perfect? Not even close.

Given a choice I'd do my work on a desktop/laptop. The one major thing my phone lacks, to make it more productive, is a full keyboard, a mouse and a fill monitor. There's also a trade off in processing power for conveniences. Even without the docking station I still always have the phone to do work on when something needs a quick change, but the docking station would just mean I don't have spend time transferring code to my phone. Obviously this is for the specific type of work I do, it would be useless for writing larger applications, but for simple productivity apps this could work.

Re:It's the apps, stupid!

[Lumpy]

"Anything like and Android/Apple phone, tablet is essentially a read only device*. You can't do any meaningful creative work on one."

All the bloggers out there would disagree with you....

Oh wait.... I see what you did there......

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.

And when the phone rings?

[niftydude]

You have the choice of:

1) keeping the computer screen up and hands-free talking and annoying everyone in your office,
2) Picking the phone up out of the dock for a more private conversation, but losing your computer screen which could be a problem if someone has a question that requires your computer, or
3) Wearing one of those stupid headsets every time someone makes a call.

I like the idea, and the hardware looks sexy, but none of those options appeal to me. Anyone have a better way?

Re:And when the phone rings?

[Medinos]

By "stupid headsets" do you mean a bluetooth earpiece? May not be something everyone wants, but it still seems like a feasible option. As long as you don't mind looking like one of those people who seem to be arguing with themselves (while usually talking with their hands) if viewed from the wrong side.

Where has this guy been hiding?

[Assmasher]

IT guys at large corporations have been monitoring this for at least TWO YEARS.

Heck, a friend of mine who works for SIEMENS says they've done some limited roll outs using the Atrix as a desktop replacement for some field support personnel. They've got teams learning the ins and outs of creating custom OS images for given phone sets so they can simply image peoples' phones the same way they do when you connect your laptop to their system now.

How eager people are to connect their 'work' phone, and what 'work' phone means now, is a bit more up for debate there. My friend says a lot of people are excited at the idea of ditching desktops AND laptops for certain types of employees and simply having offices filled with docking stations.

Re:Where has this guy been hiding?

[otuz]

Why would a single hardware provider be worse than a single software provider? The latter was never an issue for most companies. If anything, it's better for them if there is just party to support for both hardware and software if something goes wrong. You know, most companies aren't hackerspaces, where every user spends all their time tinkering various devices just for the sake of tinkering.

Re:You're not that young, oz

[BluBrick]

And I'm sure the reality is that the future of this device is somewhere between your two hyperbole-laden extremes - but that's not quite as exciting now, is it?

Ubuntu has already done this, sort of

[andyn]

Mr. Shuttleworth has already been offering Ubuntu desktop on Android phones for phone vendors. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work for laptops.

This idea fits with predictions

[erroneus]

The palm pilot gave answer to the need to take your data with you but it didn't offer much in the way of user interface because the device itself was limited by its size. This fundamental problem hasn't been addressed well since.

But now, we are seeing something I once told people was coming -- the computer [and data] is in your pocket and everything else becomes just the user interface. So wherever you go, you just plug in to whatever interfaces are available... whatever interfaces are appropriate. Your desk? Your car? The table at a restaurant or coffee shop?

Yeah, this is Microsoft's nightmare. They could have gotten involved with some of these really good ideas, but instead, they put their money and effort into keeping things the same which pretty much never works.

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...

EOMA-68

[mysteryvortex]

This idea might be better implemented as an EOMA-68 to android phone converter. Then you could use any EOMA-68 compatible devices with it including, but not limited to, clamshell keyboard/screen/touchpad devices. (I.E. a netbook shell)

As far as the RPi; I'm much more interested in this EOMA-68 compatible card which uses the more powerful Allwinner A10 CPU. That gets you the capability to run a complete open source stack (including GPU) and a datasheet! (Something which Broadcom refuses to give you for the RPi even though it was designed by Broadcom employees!)

Shamelessly copy-pasted specs for the Allwinner A10:

        1.2ghz Cortex A8 ARM Core
        MALI400MP OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU
        DDR3 Controller 800MHz 1GB max
        2160p Hardware-accelerated Video playback (4x the resolution of 1080p)
        a NAND Flash Controller that is capable of 8-way concurrent DMA (8 NAND ICs)
        4 SDIO interfaces (SD 3.0, UHI class)
        USB 2.0 Host as well as a 2nd USB-OTG Interface (USB-OTG can be reconfigured as USB 2.0 Host, automatically)
        24-pin RGB/TTL as well as simultaneous HDMI out
        SATA-II 3gb/sec
        10/100 Ethernet (MII compatible)
        a 2nd 24-pin RGB/TTL interface that is multiplexed (shared) on the same pins for a standard IDE (PATA) interface.
        GPIO, I2C, PWM, Keyboard Matrix (8x8), built-in Resistive Touchscreen Controller, and much more.

Re:BYOD...

[Rich0]

As the risks of BYOD are primarily about things like data theft/breaches and introducing malware into the organisation, I don't see providing a nice screen and keyboard as a mitigating factor.

Well, it isn't a risk in the same sense, but the other risk with BYOD is employees not being able to effectively work together.

Right now BYOD is OK because people only use it for email and browsing, for the most part.

When you try to apply that to everything else, you start having problems. One employee starts authoring all their documents in one format, and another uses a different one. So, you impose some standard. Now a bunch of employees can't comply with the standard readily, unless you buy a lot of software for them. Some employees have devices that don't work well with the corporate Exchange server or whatever.

So, then you start certifying individual models of devices. At that point you're not really doing BYOD so much as Pay For the Corporate Device. My own company has started taking that route, which just means that I don't use my smartphone for work. They don't even certify a single device for my carrier, and since they aren't paying for my phone bills, I'm not going to revolve my phone around their selections.

What's old is new --- IBM's Metacard concept

[WillAdams]

for the 21st century.

The problem is, two different sets of interface devices demand two different interfaces.

If one could re-work UI elements via theming so that the system would morph from smart phone to desktop interface and back (throwing in an intermediate Tablet size would be a great bonus) this sort of thing might work.

I've always been faintly surprised Apple hasn't had an option where an iPod could be slotted into a MacBook and used to store the user's home directory (as well as backing it up on the hard drive --- then determine which to boot based on the currently inserted iPod).

William

Re:License?

[nomaddamon]

Patents are OK as long as you actually invent and market/license something.
If you take some exiting idea, patent it and expect other companies to pay you for it... then you must be living in the US...

This is virtually the same thing as laptop docs... not to mention existing mobile docs (Motorla Lapdock)
Anyone claiming license fees or royalties from this "invention" is actually hindering innovation and it's widespread adoption

Business vs consumer

[jmorris42]

No, he works. You play at home. My current Thinkpad (X200s bought at the end of '10) only has VGA out. It has DisplayPort on the dock but not on the unit. Because they know what their customers actually have. And you go somewhere and need to plug up to a projector you will get handed a cable with a VGA connector on the end. The projector might have been replaced in the last year or two (it could have failed or something) and now support a digital input but when the conference room was built a VGA cable was run through the wall/ceiling from the projector to a wall jack near where you are going to present from.

In other words VGA is going to stick around until all those locations undergo a major remodel because HDMI isn't enough better to spend money on a crew to come in and add a second cable + HDMI booster + jack.