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Motorola's Whacked Lapdock Can Make Raspberry Pi Base
Nerval's Lobster writes "Poor sales have driven Motorola Mobility to whack the Webtop, its attempt to make Android into an all-in-one operating system for both smartphones and traditional PCs. Motorola confirmed the death to CNET before issuing a widely circulated statement. Webtop allowed users to plug their Motorola device into a special laptop dock, which could then display Web pages and files on a full screen. Supported devices included the Motorola Atrix 2, which launched with Android 2.3 ('Gingerbread') and a dual-core 1GHz processor. For those few who bought a Webtop and now need something to do with it, Liliputing posted an article earlier this year about using the device to transform Raspberry Pi into a laptop (with the aid of some key accessories). Raspberry Pi's homebrew computer features a 700MHz processor capable of overclocking to 1GHz and 256MB of RAM, as well as an SD card for longer storage—specs that lag those of the latest smartphones, but Raspberry Pi has the virtue of being quite a bit cheaper at $35."
Subject makes about as much sense as the title + first few lines of the summary. Yikes, could you at least try to write something coherent?
Motorola's Whacked Lapdock Can Make Raspberry Pi Base
So what do I do? Add water? Mix and bake?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...wait, what?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
CHEERLEADER: Ya'll are so wack.
THE UGLY ONE: Wiggidy-wack?
CHEERLEADER: Nope, just regular type.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I think there is a link missing to the actual article on Liliputing: http://liliputing.com/2012/06/turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-laptop-with-a-70-motorola-lapdock.html
As a former Atrix owner, the lapdock was really enticing until I learned its limitations. There's no webcam, so your front-facing camera only sees the back of the lapdock. For whatever reason the trackpad lacked any kind of scrolling, which is imperative for webpages. There was no edge scrolling or two-finger gesture.
They were overpriced and the only way to get them not overpriced was when you're buying your phone, which is when you're already dropping a few hundred bucks on that and new accessories (unless you've already switched to android). Then you even had to buy the $35/mo "tethering option" (what why?! It's not like you could use your phone while it was docked) after dropping another $200 on the hardware.
In the end, great concept, bad execution. Tablets moved in to this space, which I guess were more profitable for Motorola. I can't but think had it changed to be scrollable and not require tethering and have a camera, that many more people would have signed up.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
it was an idea before it's time. The phones needed more ram and more storage to be useful. 1gb of ram just wasn't enough to drive X11 and be responsive. The thing was always running out of memory and it stopped firefox from being usable on it.I loved my lapdock but the limitations were obvious. They need to revive the concept in about 3 years time and make a phone with 4-16gb of ram, when 128-256gb micro sd cards are affordable for users. Then it could replace a laptop. I can see the potential of the webdock to be a fantastic device, but right now it's too hamstrung by physical limitations.