Does Anyone Actually Want to Use a Phone as a Desktop?

I would for either basic home use or work stuff, as long as it was Windows-based...the HP Elite X3 is pretty slick with its desktop experience dock and notebook accessory. Kinda pricey right now, but they don't have anyone to compete with.
 
I had this idea years ago when I paired my HTC One X to a Bluetooth keyboard/ trackpad and propped it up with the kickstand at my desk. It was a perfectly functional device for basic tasks like reading and answering emails and I realized that with the ability to run Windows or OS X and wireless monitor connectivity, it could replace any laptop or desktop that wasn't being used as a graphical workstation or gaming rig.
 
NickJames said:
I just want my calls and texts to come through my desktop like a notification and be able to answer/reply. THANKS FOR FUCKING THAT UP GOOGLE!
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Blackberry offered this and more via their Blend app and nobody wanted it. A real shame as it was just Qt on POSIX so dead nuts simple to code for.
 
Yep. This is exactly what I've been wanting. I say hurry up and get it working. DeX looks like the first one that might be somewhat usable.

As others have said this wouldn't work in all cases but it would work for a majority of people. Hell here at work I could probably do that for 95% of the people here. The only ones that couldn't do it would be the two graphic artists and the finance guys because they need more horsepower than a phone could muster.
 
dgingeri said:
It won't matter if the phone is slow. All the computing will be done at the server level. All the storage will be done at the server level. We're already seeing games hosted on servers through virtualization and run through a remote connection. How much longer for them to figure out how to do that through a web browser? How many users would love to just do away with their laptops or desktop, and still have everything as fast as they need with all the same user experience? With a mobile client for the interface and everything else done on server/cloud level, that's exactly what they get. Those of us who want things locally, under our control, will have to just go along, as the industry will just go where the masses want to go.
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Not for me. If a game or application 'requires' an internet connection for full functionality, I won't buy it (obviously not talking about the multiplayer style games and such). No Amazon Echo, no Nest thermostat, no Cortana (I'd be willing to use it if it was totally local to my machine), no Adobe Creative Suite subscription (I'll stick with CS6), etc. Heck, I don't let my Smart TVs connect to the net. I've got my own home built DVRs for each TV, so any communication to outside servers is through my control.

I don't think the 'masses' want to go there, they in general are pretty clueless on how computer systems work. It's the companies and organizations that want it. Microsoft would love to have a walled garden similar to what Apple has, they've started down that path but it's going to take them a while to get there. I've done the switch to Linux because of the lack of control I have under Windows 10. I do dual boot, but Windows is only for games and the occasional Photoshop session, all my general computing needs are readily handled by Linux. In fact, I'm running all the same applications I was running under Windows (Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office, Octave, g++, Eclipse, CodeBlocks, etc).
 
If I had a smartphone that I could plug into some sort of laptop-like dock with a larger screen and keyboard/mouse, and get a full desktop experience...sure, that would be awesome for my job. Wouldn't replace my desktops at home.
 
dgingeri said:
This is exactly the direction we're going already. The migration to web apps, including games, is the main sign of it, but also the move to cloud infrastructure and storage. In 5 years, the only thing that a desktop computer would have to do is surf the web. The only ones holding onto local computing resources would be the hard core gamers and privacy 'nuts', of which I am one. In ten years, the whole local computing market will fall through and most people won't be ABLE to keep their games or data local. It will ALL be through phones, plugged into tablets or workstation docks for bigger screens when needed.
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I don't see it. Here's why?

Personally I already hate the integration and all Windows 10 has done for me is fuck with my computing experience, it's more in the way then it is helpful for me personally.
Professionally, as an Admin, hell no I don't want my users to pick up their machines(the company's machines), and haul them around in their pockets and use them as their personal devices, it's hard enough to keep them from using them for personal crap and touring the inter webs like morons.

And I have to throw this in as a caveat, the military and probably the government as a whole will never ever go this route so there is always going to be significant demand for more traditional platforms.

Of course I haven't played a game on my phone since I wanted to see what Pokemon Go was all about. So about a year now, not one game. I do read ebooks on my phone.

I think you have too narrow a focus in your view of things. Where I work, our people take up the entire building, it's software development, and we have about 100 or so employees working here. Not counting the workstations and servers that are the "product", each employee has on their desk at least three machines, desktops, laptops, and thin clients. There is one woman with seven, she has laptops stacked upon laptops, two KVMs, I hate having to go help her cause it's such a pain to figure out what is connected to what.

So, I could estimate that there are at least 400 computer used as desktop machines in this building, for 100 users. We do software development for a single Army applications suite.

There are several dozen just like it supporting the Army.

Then there is the Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, Border Patrol, Homeland Security, NSA, CIA, Department of Energy ..........

The Army alone has a contract with CISCO for License management, basically, the Army pays over 3 Billion a year for a no-limit all you can use license agreement with CISCO, cause it's cheaper then having to actually manage them and track them. The man-hours to manage all those licenses costs more then 3 Billion.

I guess what I am saying is that the world is really really big and not everyone has a good grasp on just how big that actually is. It boggles the mind in truth.
 
I would absolutely move to using a phone for my workstation, considering I've been wanting to move to a Surface or HP X2 tablet but I don't rank high enough to justify one. In our office environment we moved to a "touch-down" environment that I absolutely hate. Network and System Engineers all have to share the cubes, so no one has a dedicated space. That means I have to lug my laptop in when I go into the office while working from home on the other days. Due to having to work from home, I just RDP into a VM, even at the office, and do all my work there so even something like a dumb terminal would be adequate. In the case of a phone or tablet, I'm not using any real processing power on the device itself, so as long as I can get a multiple screen RDP connection and mouse/keyboard I would be fine.
 
lcpiper said:
I don't see it. Here's why?

Personally I already hate the integration and all Windows 10 has done for me is fuck with my computing experience, it's more in the way then it is helpful for me personally.
Professionally, as an Admin, hell no I don't want my users to pick up their machines(the company's machines), and haul them around in their pockets and use them as their personal devices, it's hard enough to keep them from using them for personal crap and touring the inter webs like morons.

And I have to throw this in as a caveat, the military and probably the government as a whole will never ever go this route so there is always going to be significant demand for more traditional platforms.

Of course I haven't played a game on my phone since I wanted to see what Pokemon Go was all about. So about a year now, not one game. I do read ebooks on my phone.

I think you have too narrow a focus in your view of things. Where I work, our people take up the entire building, it's software development, and we have about 100 or so employees working here. Not counting the workstations and servers that are the "product", each employee has on their desk at least three machines, desktops, laptops, and thin clients. There is one woman with seven, she has laptops stacked upon laptops, two KVMs, I hate having to go help her cause it's such a pain to figure out what is connected to what.

So, I could estimate that there are at least 400 computer used as desktop machines in this building, for 100 users. We do software development for a single Army applications suite.

There are several dozen just like it supporting the Army.

Then there is the Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, Border Patrol, Homeland Security, NSA, CIA, Department of Energy ..........

The Army alone has a contract with CISCO for License management, basically, the Army pays over 3 Billion a year for a no-limit all you can use license agreement with CISCO, cause it's cheaper then having to actually manage them and track them. The man-hours to manage all those licenses costs more then 3 Billion.

I guess what I am saying is that the world is really really big and not everyone has a good grasp on just how big that actually is. It boggles the mind in truth.
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Such situations are not lost on me. However, everything goes the way of the market. As it is, more and more users have been going with laptops for the last 2 decades. Intel geared their CPU development toward that goal. They engineered their CPUs for use in laptops.

Well, over the last decade, tablets and smartphones got popular. More and more people are using their phones to surf the web. More and more people are using their phones for all their gaming. Fewer and fewer PCs, especially desktops, have been sold over the last decade. There have been many editorial articles on how the PC is dying.

In addition, more and more apps are moving to web apps. Google Docs and MS Office, and many others, are available as web apps, where the files and the apps themselves are kept entirely on the servers. There are at least 3 major 3D games I have heard of that are moving toward a server based web client setup. The system used to access it doesn't run anything more than the display for the graphics generated on the server. Web apps are platform agnostic. Anything can run them, from anywhere. Why would people spend $1200 for a PC when they can do the same with a $300 phone, a $100 dock, and a $100 monitor? This also gives the software developers a more stable platform to run things. They don't need to test it with ten thousand different hardware configs. They just test it with 5 browsers. It reduces development costs tremendously.

Imagine, as an admin, having all your users work from home, on their own phones, on the company's web apps. No need for supporting local infrastructure or company assets for end users, just servers and web apps. The web apps are tested for the basic browsers and handed off to go into production. Fewer bugs, fewer calls from users. Even if there's a company office, all it needs is power, and maybe a cell phone system repeater or local wifi to make sure people have a decent connection to their apps.

Yes, our jobs (I'm a sysadmin too) are in danger, very much in danger. Desktop support, infrastructure support, network support, all become useless. Companies then pay for web app development and server hosting. IT costs go away almost entirely. Our jobs are relegated to supporting the hosts of the web apps. 90% fewer admins, and those that remain get paid less because of the laws of supply and demand. Then companies make better profits, people don't need to commute, and get more done in less time.

We have to see what's coming and adapt to it, make new places for ourselves in the world. In my case, I'm building a company to secure home networks, particularly home wifi and routers, but not limited to that. In the future, I'll probably have to adapt to make routers that will automatically connect to corporate VPNs to protect company data from snooping ISPs.

Don't ignore how things are changing. If you do, you will be left behind, and that is a very bad place to be in the tech arena.
 
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dgingeri said:
................... More and more people are using their phones to surf the web...........
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So I'll ask one question, who here uses their phone to surf if they have a computer at hand?

Choose the phone over the computer?

Don't ignore how things are changing. If you do, you will be left behind, and that is a very bad place to be in the tech arena.
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At the same time I would warn you not to ignore that just because there is traction and movement from the masses that this will herald change in the established bastions of infrastructure and big business.

Jane TeaCup can do all the American Express business commercials she wants and display how she swipes credit cards from her phone sans cash register, but don't think this will have any attraction to a large established business sectors.

As for being left behind, do you really think a SAN Admin is ever going to be left behind?

It doesn't matter how a user uses my data, it's still going to be stored on my storage systems.
 
I would love to see a phone that can run x86 applications with a simple/inexpensive docking solution.

By and large most of what the drones need to do their jobs doesn't take much processing power on the client side, and having fewer devices to support would be lovely.
 
Why is it that arguments seem to be exclusive. Who ever said that this had to be the only way to dock. If a phone dock takes off it could be put into lots of formats, laptop, tablet, desktop etc.... What I would like to see is a time where this could be universal and anyone with any brand phone could plug into public kiosks in many places, libraries, planes, your own car etc....

Second people here because this is hardforum forget there is a MASSIVE amount of people who have no computing device other than their phone. There is an entire generation of kids growing up on second hand phones passed down from their parents, these parents dont want to buy the kids their own laptops / desktops. So these kids become so familar with the phone they actually prefer it. Look how long it took society to get to the point they could type on a qwerty keyboard. Familarity is huge. Having the ability to dock it so they can work faster on writing an email or something is a nice feature that isn't too expensive. This isn't Samsung's first dock, but it seems to be getting more attention this time so hopefully it opens some eyes. There are also many who have very old computers that have not been updated in a decade and these people are convinced phones are better. Ultimately if you are trying to save money, 1 $800 phone and a dock is a pretty good deal compared to any 2 devices.

If I was Samsung I would use my market domination to get carriers to sell a bundle in stores that includes a monitor (Samsung of course), mouse, keyboard, dock.

Also keep in mind for people who are not tech savvy to them this is also seen as a way to get rid of the internet in their home. Your phone contains everything you need to do almost everything you need, even has MS office now days. All it needed was peripherals and you can get work done.

In the case of many of my family members they use a phone plus a desktop, no laptop. This just makes that even more viable.
 
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JDanser said:
If they can give me a god's honest desktop experience instead of Android shoehorned onto a bigger screen, I'm game. That said, it's a form factor that wasn't asked for and frankly, isn't needed. In terms of portability we already have a pretty nice ramp up from Phone > Laptop > Desktop. If and when I can pair my phone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse without a docking station, I can see this taking off.
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My Bluetooth keyboard and mouse work simultaneously with Android.
 
lcpiper said:
As for being left behind, do you really think a SAN Admin is ever going to be left behind?

It doesn't matter how a user uses my data, it's still going to be stored on my storage systems.
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As a matter of fact, yes.

Until recently, I worked for a major storage company as a test lab admin. I learned a LOT about storage, from 4Gb FC, up through 16Gb FC, into FCoE, and finally iSCSI. I learned how to manage storage for Windows, Linux, HP-UX, AIX, and even IRIX. I was working with FC equipment from Brocade, Qlogic, NetApp, and HP.

They were dying. I hadn't had a raise in over 3 years when I finally left. We had laid off so many people, from over 4000 people and 8 worldwide locations down to under 1000 and 5 locations left in the US, in three years. Just before I left, management shut down 5 product lines, including some of the most advanced storage equipment for big data and surveillance storage because it just wasn't selling. They were down to just getting by selling tape drives to government contracts to keep the lights on.

I left because I figured, with my experience with RAID, FC, iSCSI, and tape storage, I should be able to make at least $10k more per year. I was wrong. Dreadfully wrong. The SAN admin market is dreadful. Six years worth of experience in SAN management, backup management, VM management, AD administration, and inventory on over 1400 servers was entirely meaningless. I thought my virtualization experience would help me get a job. Wrong. It's ALL cloud now. Even the company I'n now working for (for $4k less per year than my lab admin job) is now going into overdrive to put all the IT infrastructure into the cloud. I'm having to crash course myself into learning Rackspace because I knew nothing about it before. I thought RAID would at least be useful. Wrong. RAID is going the way of the dinosaur now. It's all software defined storage now, from MS storage spaces to Linux BTRFS. There's now dedup in everything, so storage is lasting a lot longer. So, new storage isn't even being bought, even by cloud companies. Unless you're going to work for a cloud company, none of your current skills will mean squat pretty soon. Even then, don't count on cloud to save you, as there will be a LOT of admins in the market for new jobs soon, so cloud companies can be choosy in who they hire and who they keep.

Big companies aren't going to sit back on that either. When big corporate management figures out they can get away with a quarter of the IT staff, halve electricity consumption, not have to own 90% of their IT equipment, and have better security in the process, they'll be firing IT staff left and right to get all their stuff into the cloud. Local apps? Never mind that, they can replace everything with web apps and cut their IT costs and staff even more. Migration project? Bah, that's all handled by automation now. 200 VMs can be deployed by one person in a matter of fifteen minutes of 'coding' in Salt and suddenly the whole company's IT infrastructure is duplicated in the cloud. The migration process take a week, without the users even noticing.

Our jobs are going away, quickly. It's worse than you think.
 
I personally would have no issues with using phones as a desktop for work or everyday related stuff if they are powerful enough (they are getting close to it anyway), I wouldn't use it for gaming, that's for sure, unless desktop GPU market dies and phones are literally our only choice.

Now, whether work wants ME to do that is a completely different story, we are not allowed to take our work home because the company takes its trade secret quite seriously, so having a phone that can be easily carried around is a big NO NO, besides, 90% of the employees who can sit at the desk cannot actually use a smartphone of any sort (only either company issued phones or none at all, depending on your job details), let alone the rest of the people in the production line. So our company letting us to do that is a very big stretch.

But that's for another day, my department needs more than your average typewriter PC.
 
Sent video to my bro... He has been waiting for this.
Its 150 should be cheaper.. but it seems well executed
 
I look at the cloud and web apps like outsourcing. It looks good on the surface and saves money to a degree. Until someone with a piece of heavy machinery decides to cut fiber. I have had more than a few companies I work with went to the cloud and came right back to on prem. Either the app didn't work as well, bandwidth issues, problems getting anything fixed or generally getting anything done from the provider. Where they could call me before to fix most issues in 30 minutes without having to call support. It all works great in theory but in reality it doesn't always work. Look at all the mayhem that was caused by Amazons S3 service being down. Sure it doesn't happen all the time, but how much profit was lost from just a few hours of downtime?
 
Spaceninja said:
I look at the cloud and web apps like outsourcing. It looks good on the surface and saves money to a degree. Until someone with a piece of heavy machinery decides to cut fiber. I have had more than a few companies I work with went to the cloud and came right back to on prem. Either the app didn't work as well, bandwidth issues, problems getting anything fixed or generally getting anything done from the provider. Where they could call me before to fix most issues in 30 minutes without having to call support. It all works great in theory but in reality it doesn't always work. Look at all the mayhem that was caused by Amazons S3 service being down. Sure it doesn't happen all the time, but how much profit was lost from just a few hours of downtime?
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True.. but.. even when they cut that main fiber bundle across the US... back then where I was working, it was directly affected..
Still, it was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Soooo much more local server downtime vs. the big guys.
The Amazon mess, still nothing overall.
I mean if their systems go down so little that it makes the news....
I am not necessary in favor of big cloud and stuff though, but that is where we are going at light speed.
 
I'll be interested in seeing how this works. I believe their is a market for this and it does makes some sense even with mobile apps that can utilize a real keyboard, larger display and mouse for this like word processing and spreadsheets to the extent that mobile apps provide the functionality. Office mobile apps are fairly powerful and would be all that a lot of people need.
 
heatlesssun said:
I'll be interested in seeing how this works. I believe their is a market for this and it does makes some sense even with mobile apps that can utilize a real keyboard, larger display and mouse for this like word processing and spreadsheets to the extent that mobile apps provide the functionality. Office mobile apps are fairly powerful and would be all that a lot of people need.
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I think all of them do...I've used keyboard/trackpad on freaking android kit kat, and it worked just fine.. the arrow was your finger, and the keyboard was a keyboard!
Kinks here and there 'enter' is not the arrow thingie really, and the keyboard would show up, even though you have a keyboard of course... but this kit kat, and it was still usable pretty much just fine.
 
Yeah give me a performant x86-64 phone that can dock to a full blown computer I would Too
 
Assuming the power/speed is there...If I had a dock that would give me full size kb/mouse, AND an actual desktop mode once docked? Sure. Why not? Would be great.
 
Maybe...

We have started rolling out VDI at work, and I could see something like this working very well with the portability of VDI.
 
Heck no!


Desktop :
upload_2017-4-2_13-3-44.png



Laptop :
upload_2017-4-2_13-3-55.png



Phone :
upload_2017-4-2_13-4-7.png
 
dgingeri said:
As a matter of fact, yes.

Until recently, I worked for a major storage company as a test lab admin. I learned a LOT about storage, from 4Gb FC, up through 16Gb FC, into FCoE, and finally iSCSI. I learned how to manage storage for Windows, Linux, HP-UX, AIX, and even IRIX. I was working with FC equipment from Brocade, Qlogic, NetApp, and HP.

...................

Our jobs are going away, quickly. It's worse than you think.
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I'll agree that my statement is not correct the way I worded it. I am not worried at all by these new technologies or by the way the world is shift because my reality is too different from what the industry is doing. I work on networks that don't touch the outside world, hell they don't reach outside our building. We will never need such technologies and they will never connect these networks to the rest of the Army classified networks, we will always remain isolated and apart. And for that reason, technologies that are sweeping across the business world today are having no impact on us at all.

So I shouldn't have expected you to know this and apply my reality to your own.

EDIT: I'm jealous of some of your experience and knowledge too.
 
/dev/null said:
Thunderbolt or usb 3.1c port hooked to an external pci-e enclosure...?
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I think this is all a simple enough thing. There was a time when a computer was a great tool, nothing else could do what a PC did. But things change, and many many things that many people need can be done by other devices. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with PCs losing market share to other devices. But there are some things that other devices do not do as well as PCs.

I am sure the day will come when PCs are no longer needed, I would hope this heralds something much better. But I don't want to jump the gun for something that's less then what I have.
 
DejaWiz said:
I would for either basic home use or work stuff, as long as it was Windows-based...the HP Elite X3 is pretty slick with its desktop experience dock and notebook accessory. Kinda pricey right now, but they don't have anyone to compete with.
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It's not even competing, because it doesn't really exist - they haven't sold any. It debuted $799 - yes, a WINDOWS PHONE for $799 - and the accessories are overpriced ($600 for an empty laptop shell), and if you didn't want to be stuck running a single fullscreen metro app at a time, the VDI component is a $939 annual subscription.

But the death sentence was hitching itself to a mobile OS whose platform owner had already abandoned it internally. It never had a chance. I do wonder who at HP decided that lighting a match under millions of dollars was a good move for the company.
 
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Bigdady92 said:
I want this 100% for business settings. I want to remove the need to have a tablet, laptop, desktop, etc for sales drones. I want to give them one device and tell them to plug their shit in and they get the same apps and performance as they would with all the other gadgets.

If apple did this I'd toss out dozens of latops, ipads, desktops immediately and roll this out. I can control every device remotely and every IOS device has office to be installed. I'd cut down on Windows licensing as well.

No one builds apps (or hardware) for Microsoft phones and , in my company, our custom IOS apps need to run.
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Sounds reasonable,except for the fact that your company's proprietary apps, back-end programming, etc. may need to be tailored towards the iOS (or MacOS) du jour if this rollout were to actually happen.
Plus point - AirWatch can be a very decent "big brother"-type control /command center for iOS devices (and MacOS) - Plus, works quite well with Active Directory.
 
DPI said:
It's not even competing, because it doesn't really exist - they haven't sold any. It debuted $799 - yes, a WINDOWS PHONE for $799 - and the accessories are overpriced ($600 for an empty laptop shell), and if you didn't want to be stuck running a single fullscreen metro app at a time, the VDI component is a $939 annual subscription.

But the death sentence was hitching itself to a mobile OS whose platform owner had already abandoned it internally. It never had a chance. I do wonder who at HP decided that lighting a match under millions of dollars was a good move for the company.
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I agree to an extent...btw, the HP Workspace (VDI) subscription isn't required, as a custom VDI can be implemented on the company's network.

I see this as a stepping stone solution: what Microsoft needs to do is implement full-blown Windows 10 Enterprise on a 3-in-1 device (think small Surface with calling capability).
Instant success.
 
DejaWiz said:
I agree to an extent...btw, the HP Workspace (VDI) subscription isn't required, as a custom VDI can be implemented on the company's network.

I see this as a stepping stone solution: what Microsoft needs to do is implement full-blown Windows 10 Enterprise on a 3-in-1 device (think small Surface with calling capability).
Instant success.
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For all of the criticism of the hybrid UI approach in Windows 8 and into Windows 10, Windows desktop convergence devices are selling very well currently, and it's not just the Surface, there are dozens of 2 in 1s and there's been a interesting rise in some very cheap Chinese Windows 2 in 1s though I know a lot of folks wouldn't touch those, pun intended. A Surface Phone, a 3 in 1 device that can run Win32 apps, at least things like Office, light Photoshop that was pen enabled, yeah, there's a niche market for something like that. It's would in any way change the overall landscape and make Windows phones huge sellers, but that kind of flexibility would sell in certain markets, and I think carriers like Verizon, would have some interest in selling and supporting them, unlike Windows phones currently.

Microsoft needs to get this done sooner rather than later and should have had this out years ago as it might have been enough to keep Windows phones from totally collapsing.
 
HeavensCloud said:
I think the SoftForum would like this idea.
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Nah...being able to play full-blown x86/x64 classic games in a computer I can carry around in my pocket (and make calls from) because it has the full desktop version of Windows on it would be quite [H].
 
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