For this to catch on, in my mind, it needs to provided an experience that can replace a desktop, otherwise having to have a dock, monitor, keyboard & mouse, might as well just add an Intel compute stick and have a 10 times better experience.
Wow, this a deal breaker.
Amazon Spaces also has "first party" support.
The one place it really exceeds the desktop is answering calls and responding to text, puts Google Voice and Skype to shame.
I'm somewhat tempted to try it, maybe not at RRP though. Although I get the feeling it will end up in the pile with the Occulus Rift and all the other gimmicky stuff I've accumulated...
It's amazing when you can be completely immersed and not have to worry about bumping into, or tripping into things. Just finished the Rick and Morty and am playing a "shoot the robots" that are trying to kill you game, very intense, a good workout.
It's almost like they have to scrape data by reading notifications, and relaying that, and can't directly interact with the mobile OS on a deeper level. Ultimately not super useful for me, hope Android Oreo provides more opportunities for greater integration.
So you're saying your cell phone makes a better cell phone than a desktop computer? That's about what I figured.
That sort of thing I would never do on my phone or tablet, just because of the form factor I keep my footprint much smaller.
Other than occasional crashes and a tiny bit of lag, my aged phone handles it very well.
On the other hand, when I'm on the desktop I open multiple browser instances with 20+ tabs open on each of them. I guess I have a problem :).
yes, its (at least on android) just swiping twice (once from the top to open the window view and then to the side to close it), but even that takes more effort than just mouse-wheel clicking on the tab.
After that tab is closed, the browser needs to rebuild the new/old tab. thats even more time you wouldn't have on the desktop.
everything just takes a little longer on the highly performance optimized phone, and it adds up to stop - at least me - from just going into the comments threads. especially because actually opening takes even longer, as you'd have to long press on the link to get that option.
now, with this device you'd be able to actually click/close tabs as fast as on your general desktop. Suddenly, the device is no longer constrained by the slow inputs that the user is giving. And now, the phone will actually need to perform that much better with the same amount of resources. I haven't used the DeX and don't know wherever its able to handle that, but thats (i think) the thing most people hearing about it are worried about.
The person who most wants to use their phone as a PC is the person who can't afford spending $4000 on the entire suite of Apple devices.
That person probably also can't afford a $100 dock (let alone a $300 one) for their phone.
When someone makes a USB-C/Thunderbolt/Intel/Windows device that is phone sized but runs legacy Windows applications (like MS Paint and Quickbooks and 90s-era video games), and connects with commodity connectors, then the idea stands a chance.
(IMHO, Windows Continuum died because of a chicken-and-egg problem -- no iOS devs wanted to pay $1000 for Visual Studio plus a Windows laptop, but no users used the phone because key apps were missing.)
I'd love to have just one computing device that covers everything for the sake of simplicity. At times I've found myself carrying a smartphone, laptop, tablet and a smart watch, plus ton of cables and adapters... almost 10 pounds or 5kg of electronics just to cover all my use cases. Dragging that through airports for example is ridiculous.
An iPad is powerful enough for most typical workloads.
Therefore, my iPhone is powerful enough for most workloads.
If I could dock my phone into something that gave me a monitor, keyboard, and (so I don't have to lift my arm up over and over) a trackpad, that would solve my home computing needs 85% of the time.
Apple could pull the trigger on running full OSX on a phone or iPad if they thought there was a market for it but it would be a backwards-looking step.
It’s not exactly an innovation leap to think “hey, phones will match desktop PC performance, we could plug one into peripherals and make a device that can become a desktop”, everyone has had that idea. It just seems a bit backwards looking? In 10 years time the power of a current Mac Pro will probably be available in a watch with 5G+ bandwidth. If necessary, a desktop OS experience could be an app or a cloud service on whichever screen (or headset) is available.
The entire home wall video monitor in the beginning of the movie Total Recall (first version) would be great to have everywhere. Just as you change music you could make your environment look like anything and this same technology would let you grab a little near by space to use as a screen. Too expensive now but in ten years, perhaps.
Expect Xiaomi to release a $25 knockoff for their phones if there's ever a demand for it. I suspect there's very little in the dock hardware itself over a standard USB-C OTG charging hub with HDMI passthrough and an ethernet port. Maybe I'm wrong but the rest is just software on the phone?
well the atrix costed $400 usd and even with a monthly plan was way cheaper than the samsung galaxy s8
and even on a monthly plan it was cheaper than the current galaxys. still all people bought the galaxys
It's a useful feature and because we already have too many devices finds little use but once its seamless it could offer many possibilities.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s50GWuKphTI
[2] https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s8/how-to/dex-unexpe...
What I think people are more skeptic about is performance and user experience.
Here in Europe, contracts are the exception not the rule.
Most people just charge with 15 to 20 euros their SIM card whenever they feel like it, and have to pay full price for mobile phone.
Or pay it in rates to only have it unlocked from the network at the end of two years, so they are going to use that phone until it dies or gets stolen.
I'm pretty sure that hasn't been true for years.
"Around 70% of customers in Western Europe and China use prepaid phones with the figure rising to over 90% for customers in India and Africa"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepay_mobile_phone
I only know people with contracts regarding iPhone, which is the only affordable way to get them new in many of the European countries.
> while in Europe the proportion is 50%, reaching 75% in
> Northwestern Europe as compared to 40% in South-Eastern
> European states.
Data is from 2015. Given the overall trend I wouldn't be surprised if even more people have switched to contract by now.
But I do agree from 2012 to 2015 it did change in the direction you meant.
As teamhappy pointed out, I am kind of wrong, as the data did indeed change for contracts, but was is still low in 2015 regarding southern countries, the ones I tend to visit regularly.
But it would still be nice to know if someone can point out to 2017 data.
What has become super common is for home cable provider to provide SIM with around 2G of data in order to pay monthly broadband charge. SIM recharge being easier than vanilla broadband recharge.
(I've always had a prepaid smartphone, and the options were atrocious in 2010 and barely existed beyond the Nexus in 2012)
I think that's what the parent was talking about: Most people that wouldn't mind a simpler UX and less performance can't afford this phone/dock in a first place... and the people that would afford this (have an S8 and don't mind buying a $300 dock) will be skeptical about the usefulness and performance of this system.
People will feel that they can absorb $20 or even $30 extra per month on their plan for a top tier phone. Absorbing any hit over $200 when someone lives hand to mouth makes these a non-starter.
The best chance for mass success for this option is for it to be included in the base purchase.
Also, majority of people just use email and word suite. An S9 is easily capable of doing these tasks and it saves the individual or company cost of a cpu box (400 USD at the low end).
My point is, it really doesn't matter what the reality of the cost/loan is, people who think "$30/mo! I can do that!" are probably not also going to think $200 seems like a good price for basically a cable to plug my phone into my computer.
Obviously, your other point was that it could come with a plan too but that seems doable but also there's yet another cost on top of the phone they were just barely justifying already. I'm not saying you're wrong but I think the price of this device is ridiculous.
I might pay $80 for it if it were really something I needed but, as others have said, I don't carry my phone around to be a computer. I carry it to be a phone. On top of that, I never really have a situation where I've got a keyboard, mouse, and monitor just sitting around waiting for something to activate them. So I'm not sure when I'd use this anyway.
So I don't need additional computers in my life but if my phone had docking support I'd seamlessly just plug it into my existing setup.
As the laptop and pc depreciate over time and phone hardware improves with every generation, a DeX platform becomes more attractive as a node on my KVM setup.
For such a setup to work and really make sense though it'd have to be available as near-ubiquitous infrastructure one could expect in every hotel and every office.
I suppose, however, the travelling tradesman / digital nomad target audience just isn't large and profitable enough (as of now at least) to warrant such a large-scale infrastructure undertaking.
If anything I would love to see a modern version of the Droid/Milestone I never understood why Motorola stopped making them, the Milestone was by far the best device I ever had.
The Droid wasn't bigger than an average Android phone at the time and still packed an almost full keyboard and a dpad.
Same thing with the built-in Linux desktop on a Asus motherboard I had, I don't even remember the name of the thing.
I believe the concept is here to stay, but like tablet PCs back in 2003 it did not find its niche yet. There aren't just too many occasions you'd have a mouse, a keyboard, a monitor, but not some kind of x86_64 computer near.
Still, it's likely the breeding ground for a number of innovations and it may finally catch up...it just does not make so much sense to me to include only on the flagship products: why would you cut so much people on the mid range out of a feature you don't even know if and where will catch up?
Why so hung up about a keyboard and mouse? Even the local supermarkets here sell them dirt cheap these days.
Here's one it could (but doesn't quite) solve.
At my office everyone carries around their laptop and is constantly trying to get it to work with the telecomm and video software. Some people have a work phone, a work laptop and a personal phone too. I even know some people who add a tablet to that mix. Sometimes I see them bouncing around between all those devices.
For most employees (not necessarily coders) it probably makes sense to just have one device: a phone that you can edit excel and powerpoint on. A universal dock should exist in every meeting room and on every desk.
The major impediments to this are currently the power of the device, the ability to use the os for actually making things, and the existence of a decent dock.
With this dock and the power of the latest generation of phones, we're just stuck on the fact that no one has been able to make an os that actually works well on both mobile devices and as a keyboard/mouse driven system for creating things.
Yeah, I'm looking straight at you, Windows 8.
I have no idea how the software will look though. Maybe it will be just a fancy and reall easy to use remote connection, in the end?
So it isn't a question of computing power, it's a question of utility: who actually needs this? What benefit does it provide over and above just having a cheap PC to do PC things and a smartphone to do smartphone things and syncing documents between the two? It's not cheaper, it's not more convenient, it's not more productive, it's not more powerful, so what's the point?
It should be trivial for me to turn my phone into a computer. I should need only a $20 USB hub in order to power my phone and connect it to a keyboard, mouse, one or even several screens. Or even connect them wirelessly.
Then, the OS should trivially handle this case and offer me access to high quality desktop apps.
I don't think either condition is true now.
When this point is reached I'm pretty sure half of the laptop sales will evaporate within a short time.
Check the Samsung DeX page to see how it looks. The use case you've described is already here.
It's one thing when a random person (no offense, Dennis Aleynikov) does it, another one when you have 6 big companies competing for this segment.
And I'm not sure the software part is here. At least not in a polished way. The closest solutions that come to mind are Microsoft UWP (but Microsoft doesn't seem to be gaining traction due to various reasons, not least because they're Microsoft and few people trust them these days...) and Ubuntu Unity (I think they've abandoned the concept?). From what I've read Android tablet and desktop apps are not really up-to-par, at least today.
As for use cases, I think there'd be a few;
1. As you've said, C-levels
2. Home users that don't want a computer, but work from a desk (I actually think this would be a huge market)
3. Weirdo's like me who'd set up a new desk in my home just for this, and maybe use it once. I suspect there'd be a few of us...
4. Mobile 'knowledge' workers, another potentially large market here.
For just about all of those, they're going to be among the least patient users you could ask for so again performance is going to be HUGE. If a Word doc takes more than a couple of seconds to open, then that's a problem.
With "Linux on Galaxy" I guess you'd be running whatever DE you like. Unless they've done it differently and you're in DeX desktop but can run full Linux apps there. Not sure.
Microsoft has been trying to throw Windows onto ARM for a long time, to no commercial success, because the entire value proposition is the enormous back catalog of Win32 applications which will never run performantly on ARM. So the best bet is Linux leading the change, with Linux on ARM powering desktops and driving demand for desktop apps to be compiled to ARM - but yeah, not going to happen any time soon.
I think there's a slightly different model that makes even more sense ...
What we see with DeX (and Altrix, etc.) is the phone as the CPU that gets plugged into larger devices.
But what I think makes more sense is a smaller module, as the CPU, that gets plugged into larger devices including a phone.
So instead of plugging your phone into your "PC" you would move the core module from your phone, to your PC.
That way the core module can be much smaller and can power future phone upgrades, etc.
I think a PCMCIA[1] card (a "PC-CARD") would be a great form factor for the compute module...
[1] People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/18/palm_foleo_laptop_u...
On the local machine? People whose serious work is done remotely, e.g., using Virtual Desktop infrastructure or cloud services. Heck, with even gaming starting to be doable remotely in the cloud, it's more credible every day that people can live with just light productivity and persistent browser state locally.
It's a neat idea, ultimately, but I think we're a few years away from a good way to do it UX wise.
It seems like a neat idea on the surface though, so I wonder why as a concept the phone-connected-to-desktop-peripherals thing hasn't gained more traction. My suspicion is that there isn't really a target user that this makes more sense for. Who happens to keep desktop peripherals on their desk but only does lightweight productivity tasks? CEOs who only answer email? Certainly not software developers or even accounting people.