I'm not sure you or I are the people most in need of a solution like this.

Consider, there are over 5 billion active cell phone subscriptions in the world. That's more cell phones than toothbrushes or toilets. And smart phones are being adopted in the developing world at a surprising rate. For many people, a smartphone will be their first and only computer.

If Canonical can enable desktop style content creation for people in emerging markets who will "leapfrog" over computers, just as they leapt over landlines, the impact could be enormous.

Why would someone in the developing world want their computer to be reliant on their phone? Presumably for cost, but that isn't an argument for docking-phones, is it? You'd still need the system case/power supply, display, keyboard, and pointing device (and would presumably also have speakers and camera, though I suppose you could reuse those of the phone, if you were really trying to cut costs). The only thing missing is the "computer", and an ARM system-on-a-chip that packages multicore CPU, memory, and a little storage can't cost more than $10 today, can it? Besides, since you'd have to have smarts to drive the networking/remote desktop features of the non-computer computer, you'd probably use a very similar chip anyway.

Why? To have all your computing stuff with you all the time. That is not just your documents, but your programs and settings. And to only maintain one system. They way i see it, the only rival to this vision is the cloud, and there are a lot of issues there[1]

Battery isn't going to be a problem either. With today's solutions you could just plug in one cable which connects to the monitor and charges the phone. Tomorrow- your desktop will have a surface to put your phone on that will charge it (like your toothbrush charges), perhaps authenticate with NFC, and then connect to your display with WiDi or similar, and your keyboard.. yes, seamlessly. Another thing you will have gained is you won't have to buy a second device. Of course, we here are likely to be the last to give up a computer-proper.

[1]: other than the obvious trust, reliability and privacy issues-- there is currently no solution for most applications-- licencing issues? many companies are likely to drag their heels here. And when there finally is a technically perfect and complete solution; how are you going to pay for this? advertising, $, or selling your data. Or, you could just keep it in your pocket, yourself.

Can you clarify the phrasing of your cloud issues? Do you mean there is no solution for trust/privacy issues, or do you mean there is no solution for licensing?

As for paying, this is a non-issue, you are going to pay either way.

There is no one i trust with my data more than me, and large projects have a poor history with trust/privacy.

When I talk about licencing i'm talking about the future: where you could use the cloud to access full fat programs like photoshop (after getting over any technical issues with remote installs). AFAIK there aren't provisions in current licences for such things.

Even if you have to spend for (more) local storage/backup, it is very likely to be much cheaper, and i would have a strong preference for the buy-once (and own) rather than rent monthly model.

So you are willing to commit to cloud-only, controlled by a random corp and subject to network availability but you are not going to trust the hardware you can carry in your pocket?

Notice that no one is saying that a secondary cloud-tier is excluded from this vision...

If I didn't want to do cloud sync, I'd be more excited about a local sync. One doesn't tend to generate gigabytes of data on a phone so even a Bluetooth sync would be sufficient for most people.

You don't use your smartphone to capture HD video, do you?

I do from time to time. Even they can be transferred over today's WiFi in a matter of seconds. My point is that keeping local devices in sync for all but a very few uses is already today easily solvable. So I wonder why we'd want to move to an architecture where our computers are reliant on our phones... there seem to be some significant tradeoffs to that model and it's not clear to me what real gains there would be.

>keeping local devices in sync for all but a very few uses is already today easily solvable.

No, it really isn't. Manual file transfer is... doable, but still more problematic than it should be. But there is absolutely nothing that will seamlessly keep my phone in sync with my tablet when I don't have network access (i.e. I take a photo on my phone and it's on my tablet, without me doing anything). If you have a solution, link please.

It's not solved, it's easily solvable. :)