If there is anything that I would really have, and have wanted for more then ten years now, since the smartphones are basically mobile pocket computers with calling, camera and messaging capabilities. We have flagship phones that are 10 times as strong as a Raspberry Pi, but we still don’t have a phone that you can use as a daily driver. I want to be able to have a phone, that I place in a dock, when I do, a chosen Linux OS starts up, and you are using the phone hardware to surf the web, watch videos, listen to music, program with etc etc. If you want to play games nowadays you have Stadia and Playstation Now, you will probably quite soon also have a Microsoft Cloud service that offers gaming on the go that is not dependant of any hardware more then the network connection.
I’m still waiting. Why is it so darn difficult for people in these industries to actually release something that is useful, it should still be two firmwares connected too each other, making it possible to through LOOKING GLAS use the phones primary functions in the linux distro that you use. Making such a leap that laptops, minicomputers, etc. might not even be more then a plaything for your pets or children.
I for one, actually don’t want my big ass computer, it’s loud and expensive and the only thing different with this one and my phone is that I can play some heavy duty games, but thats about it, oh yeah… I can run a fully working operating system, almost forgot that.
Wasnt there a Samsung DEX thing that you can plug into a monitor and made it into a Linux OS of sorts? Sadly it was discontinued and it was only available to their flagship level phones.
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NO! The DEX is not that kind of thing. Yes it is a docking station that you can connect the essential monitor, keyboard and mouse to, but it uses the same android os, and makes it bigger, basically giving you Google Chrome/Chrome OS. Making your monitor a non-touch xx" tablet with the need of extra things to work. No wonder the DEX never really got to the bigger consumer markets. I wanted one, but then saw a video, and thought. Uhm, noo, not going to spend money on a thing that just makes my screen go bigger basically. There are MHL dongles for that.
You can run a regular Linux distribution on it, not just the regular android stuff.
I guess the normies has not much of a use case for it so Samsung simply discarded it instead of wasting R&D money on it.
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I will look into it, if it is as you say, it’s probably for a newer phone, and that means money needed, I still use the Galaxy 8s. It was expensive.
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Do report back on what you experienced on it. I really dont have a Samsung phone to tinker with it so all i have is youtube videos and 2nd hand accounts of people using it.
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It still feels really limited and as locked. I want open source capabilities. It would had been really awesome if PinePhone or Librem could do what the Galaxy does.
I think Google is becoming a Monopoly, and that means they will get too much power over the consumers, and limitations are implemented all the time, small ones that people don’t really react to, and later on it’s going to be so limited that it’s not even worth having on the hardware it’s on.
Is it possible to create a phone with a real computer apu? Because that would be a game changer, and we actually have mini displayports and mini hdmi. Why not add that directly?
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That ship has already sailed and we’re only really just starting to see the effects of that on at least a superficial legal level.
I remember there used to be quite a few dual-boot android/windows tablets on the market but I don’t think it was ever implemented on a wide scale on phones… mainly because WIndows Phone OS was a miserable failure.
Perhaps with a battery the size of a brick. ARM’s whole claim to fame on mobile is that their processors don’t drink power through a firehose.
Also, some phones have displayport output through their type-c ports.
I think the real reason we don’t have a ton of these features you’re wanting is because in the grand scheme of things, there’s no market for them, at least not yet.
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Well, you can’t create a market for it if you don’t pitch it and put your time into it. The big one’s have the money needed, but they also sell computers and laptops usually in a third-part way because of patents etc, which makes them stay away from making products that fight for the positions on the market.
I was really hyped by the Ubuntu Saphire phone or what it was called that used Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Desktop on one device, but they basically recalled the project and I haven’t really followed up the process at all now.
The Pine Phone is really interesting, but it would had been really super interesting if it had been a high end machine. I buy the flagships because they do not lag 3 month’s after you have bought them, my phone was reflashed like a year ago or so with a custom firmware, yet it’s really stable, no lag and no problems everything works.
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Dex was good, but Ubuntu basically got there with the Aquarius M10. The FUD version has a mini hdmi socket, and when you connect a full hdd screen, the O/S changed to “desktop “ mode, with full mouse and keyboard support. It did not have USB input support, but Bluetooth keyboard and mouse worked okay*
The system would run full fat Firefox and liver office and such.
But it was not powerful, and the user experience was poor.
Not enough people signed up, so the project got canned.
So, there was the system OP wanted, but limited release means it died.
Maybe pine64 will release a similar thing in a few years?
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Phones sold to be dual boot, no. Make an Android phone dual boot, absolutely possible since Android 9 officially due to the presence of two system partitions. But with custom recovery there was something that allowed to boot two different ROMs. Can’t remember the name thou, being out of XDA for years now.
Also regarding your reasoning you have to consider that the mass market is looking for something simple, that does social media, takes good pics, loads apps fast and can play the occasional game. That’s about it. Us “nerds” (not meant in a derogatory way, just using it for sake of brevity) are a very very small slice of the huge smartphone market. That’s why companies like Pine don’t invest into making very powerful phones but are still just testing the waters with cheap devices.
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The Moto RAZR had a nice desktop mode in the original firmware. Then Google bought Motorola, and updated the Android version for the RAZR, and eliminated desktop mode. There was even a laptop style dock with keyboard, touchpad and display.
I thought that was really innovative at the time, but I think Google feared it might compete with the upcoming Chromebook, so they killed it.
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