Yeah, I'm excited about this possibility too. It's a shame Canonical couldn't get the Ubuntu on Android project off the ground (too little interest from phone manufacturers/carriers AFAIR). However, all is not lost, there's another project working on this kind of convergence, will happily install their Android ROM when it's ready... https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/linuxonandroid
There's some tiny bluetooth keyboard projectors that now use green laser light and are very bright.
Here's a vendor that apparently sells them (but I couldn't find any pictures of the green keyboard versions).
Some of their interesting devices
http://www.ctxtechnologies.com/products/misteex/
http://www.ctxtechnologies.com/products/vk300-iphone-docking...
Motorola has been very good at embracing this. Their Moto G is by no mean perfect, but it is an excellent phone at an affordable price.
The 'race to bottom' is often decried in our era obsessed with profits and money, but bringing this kind of first grade technology to anyone on the planet is a pretty good goal. I am very excited by what Android One will be able to bring. It is time for this kind of project : it is now possible to build good smartphones at low prices.
Even as a mobile developer, phone launchs are pretty boring. There has not been a major breakthrough in quite some time and I suspect that they are going to be increasingly rare.
These devices come nowhere close to competing with traditional computers. Not yet...
I posit that phones outperform laptops for a lot of people (possibly because upgrading your phone is more widely encouraged).
For historical perspective, Core 2 Duos are from 2006/7. And T7200 is a laptop version, slower than desktop equivalents of the same era.
Desktop CPUs are still much, much faster than phone CPUs. Here's a table with lots of numbers:
http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks...
The iPhone 5s, with the "desktop class" A7 chip, has about 15% of the computing power of an i7 4770k, by this benchmark.
Personally, I don't use mobile devices - neither phones nor laptops - for compute-heavy operations. Everything from compilation to video transcoding takes way longer than on a decent desktop. Phones are not close to threatening that yet, not by a long shot.
Trivial work, like text editing, light photo manipulation, sure. Anything that could be done on a PC 15 years ago, sure. But they're nowhere near one another.
One option is to run compute-heavy stuff on a networked server, which you SSH into from a lightweight phone/tablet/Chromebook. I can definitely see myself working like that, if I could get a phone or tablet with a docking station.
In the case of a quad cortex A7, like the one in the Moto G, or the MediaTek MT6589 in the bench comparison, we see that the performances are too bad to replace a laptop. With a score of 1258 it is comparable of the best good old netbooks with Intel Atom.
The same could be done for a desktop-like computing environment... for that matter a laptop shell... just a battery, screen, keyboard, trackpad that your phone controls.
We're really at a point where this should be doable and eminent... if say Tesla and Apple could get together on this (with very liberal licensing for other companies, as long as they meet the full spec) would be the most likely chance of this getting out there and succeeding.
Logically separated layers. Not "you don't like the display server... well you have to re-implement everything from scratch yourself". You know, normal computer things.
edit I'm thinking basically of this use-case, but with the projector in the phone.
http://www.brookstone.com/laser-projection-virtual-keyboard
edit apparently this is as close as is available (almost)
http://www.ctxtechnologies.com/products/vk300-iphone-docking...
Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, of course, already on the desk. Chromecast hooked up to the monitor. Use one of the Android automation apps to automatically mirror the display via Chromecast when the phone is in range of the BT keyboard / mouse on your desk and when it is laying flat on a surface (plopped onto the desk).
Not perfect. Chromecast latency might be an issue. You would still have to plug it into a charger if you don't have wireless charging. But it should work.
So they are around, just hard to find.
Yeah I know hardware always keeps getting better and cheaper, but still when you stand back for a second, and think about it, it's kind of wow. I guess the innovation here is making a decent device that's cheap, but the fact that it's cheap and small and has good specs and battery life? Wowzers.
Yet, I almost wish these devices did a little bit more to work in non-handheld modes. I'd be happy to ditch my laptop for most things if I could get better interface access to the hardware in a modern smartphone, even if the interface wasn't optimal, an impromptu computing environment at a coffee shop would be pretty nice. Hell, I just got a Note 3, and it's just about as powerful as the desktop I replaced at the end of last year. I'd wager it's too powerful for most of the mobile junk I do with it. Plopping it down on a table next to my coffee and just turning it onto "computer" mode would be pretty amazing.
Something like what's outlined here with pico projectors.
https://pdf.yt/d/J5nSHPu5dzdpWwvn
Another issue is that, when phone shopping, it's hard enough to tell what are the newer devices vs what are the models on the way out (and on the way out of being supported). $180 is just about at the price of phones that are on the way out vs. ~$300 for phones that are current models. It won't matter to many people, but unless the phone sales guy tells you, or you're up to date on current phone releases, you might give this a pass.