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About LinkBacksRead more.The phone slots in to place where the laptop touch pad would usually reside.
Read more.The phone slots in to place where the laptop touch pad would usually reside.
Baffling. Either use the phone to power the laptop and basically have the laptop shell as a set of better HIDs, screen, inputs/outputs and battery or make the laptop more powerful than the phone by some margin and use it to charge the phone and access its data.
Why double up on hardware like this? It's nearly the same hardware as in the damned phone so why not just use that? Cooling might be an issue but a low speed fan sorts that very easily.
As for a second screen again it's just baffling. All you're gonna do is get palm prints all over your phone screen and be covering it with your hands most of the time anyway. Plus you'll have to look down at it at an awkward angle to view it, etc. I'm sure Apple will have tried this configuration and rejected it and they went for using gestures on a trackpad and a second screen right below the main screen. Probably for the reason that this is a cack idea.
Autoplaying video, closing tab.
I've forgotten how long this idea has been floating around for....it's been that long.
Last edited by LSG501; 09-01-2018 at 05:55 PM.
meh, there is no need for this in my life or anyone really.
If I lose my phone my laptops going to be gutted.
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Erm .. it doesn't double up the hardware. It's a dumb laptop shell that is powered by the phone. I thought that was pretty clear from the article, and it's confirmed by visiting the links in the article for more details....Originally Posted by philehidiot
I really like the lapdock idea and modern phones are more than powerful enough to use as a productivity-focused laptop, but they're not mass-market and no-one's really been able to make the idea stick yet. When the Atrix was around I often wondered why they didn't use the phone touch display as a trackpad/tablet, so it's interesting to see Razer go down that route. I rather suspect that this will end up being a niche product that quickly dies, though ... it seems very few people want non-Windows productivity machines.
These types of docking stations would be good in a world where everyone has smart phones but not the budget for a laptop, unfortunately for these companies (or fortunately depending how you look at it!) we don't live in such a world and people would rather have a fully functional windows/mac os laptop/tablet for their mobile work needs.
Although I do think microsoft could have capatalised on this by bringing out some kind of student windows phone bundle that docks into a windows laptop so they could save money on the tech they need for work, some kind of scheme through the universities would have been great for them providing they could pull students away from apple and samsung with it.
Been tried before - Asus have had several attempts at this and none have ever taken off - fairly recently (2014) with the Asus Transformer Book V and they had another go previously.
Its never taken off - there is too much of a compromise at the moment. You either end up with an Android laptop which has very limited real world use for most people, or you get a very underpowered windows laptop (as with the Asus option).
As Evilcycle says, I have hoped in the past that Microsoft would provide a solution here - but to be honest I don't think it's needed anymore. Most of the benefits (other than potentially cost) center around keeping data/contacts/look&feel/apps consistent between devices - i.e. you could get an email on your phone, plug into the laptop case and continue working - have all been provided by cloud storage & vastly improved internet connectivity really, so I don't see much point anymore.
It's still kind of a cool idea, but I doubt there's a market for this anymore.
See, I've always thought of the benefit as getting the laptop user experience cheaper (since theoretically the lapdock shouldn't be much more than a KVM console, with maybe some battery and storage, as in this case). But part of that is that most people want a laptop either for light productivity, which Android isn't great at (although having MS Office available on Android might have changed that a bit), or they want it for more serious work which needs more powerful hardware than you could fit in a phone.
If Windows on ARM actually works (although I suspect it'll be the 'S' version, so Windows Store apps only) then I could see a Windows phone + lapdock being quite attractive to businesses who are already invested in the Office 365 ecosystem, and, potentially, students (given the Office 365 is apparently now free for students). I suppose the downside is; what happens when you get a phone call while using the lapdock? Always have to wear a headset? Always have to use speakerphone? Undock but then lose the laptop capabilities? I suspect the whole UX is just not quite right....
You would think it could drive it as a Chromebook, with some hackery.
I stand corrected, I misread it and thought it said there was a second S835 in the laptop.
In that case no way would I buy as manufacturers have a tendency to see phones as having a 2 year lifecycle and make none of the accessories being compatible with the next model.
But at least my inability to read does explain why I was so baffled...
I thought Google were doing something to roll Android and Chrome OS into each other? If that happened that a phone that turns into a Chromebook might have legs...
Yeah, I can see how you read it like that - slightly ambiguous writing!
iirc the various Atrix lapdocks kept the same layout of USB and HDMI plugs so they worked with any generation, but that's something of an exception, I'll admit.
This.
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