I'd love a phone on which the "phone" UI was simply on choice of app but could be docked to an HDMI & USB device, then boot up windows and run windows desktop apps. I'm not too fussed if it is a little slow.

Heck, you could even just use the phone's display as a keyboard / touchpad for the windows OS while displaying a desktop on the monitor.

You might. Take you, everyone else who might over the next 10 years, then increase by two orders of magnitude and you are still a tiny drop in the bucket that can't possibly compete. Network effects mean there probably won't be another mobile OS any more than there will be another desktop OS to gain traction. There are the two leaders and everyone else is permanently relegated to <1%.

BTW: I keep seeing people talk about this hybrid concept but I have yet to see a UI toolkit that trivially scales up and down between phone/desktop. It mostly seems to involve a lot of compromises and a lot of extra work.

I would be happy to run two different OSes (and maybe 2 different CPUs), the mobile one getting access to the phone screen and the desktop one with access to the monitor, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (or the phone as touchpad). One or more shared directores for file sync (pictures, videos, downloads, etc)

The problem is that there is no phone with an i7, 32 GB RAM and 1TB SSD now. That's my laptop. My phone is a sub 5" Xperia X Compact. 3GB, 32 GB storage, a Snapdragon 600 something. Fast but not suited for the job I'm doing on the laptop.

Then the battery. It would drain as fast as the one of those old laptops that need to have theirs replaced.

We're still not there and I not sure there is a market for that. Maybe we'll get there by inertia once batteries and cycles per Watt will allow it. The direction we are headed now for this use case is the phone CPU driving a smart terminal to a powerful remote computer, with attached monitor and input peripheral.

An alternative to docking station: these AR screens and keyboards from the Dennou Coil scifi anime https://mengle.wordpress.com/tag/dennou-coil/ Kind of Google Glasses required.

>BTW: I keep seeing people talk about this hybrid concept but I have yet to see a UI toolkit that trivially scales up and down between phone/desktop. It mostly seems to involve a lot of compromises and a lot of extra work.

Except I don't care about desktopified android/iOS/windows phone apps. All I want is to run my already existing open source desktop linux applications. Chroot on android doesn't have hardware acceleration and you have to use VNC for anything graphical.

That's precisely what a fully-realized Continuum experience would be. Using the latest Windows on ARM with x86 emulation and the Composable Shell (CShell) [1] would give you a great experience.

Note that the Lumia 950 with the current production of Continuum is effectively a technology demo of that model since it doesn't have x86 emulation [2] and therefore can't run the full breadth of Windows applications. That said, Continuum already does use the Phone's display as a keyboard, mouse, or just a second display according to your preference.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNxtMtlrm6U

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2y1cKh-KXs