Idea: An Android Tablet "Shell"
jcs.org
jcs.org
Taking out the CPU from the shell and replacing it with a connector sounds like a good idea, but what if the connector costs more than the CPU? The CPU is just one small portion of a single chip in a phone, and high density high speed connectors that can also carry significant power are really quite expensive. You do save some money by not needing as much flash & RAM, but the cost savings are far less than you'd expect.
What you're really doing is making your phone more expensive: adding that expensive connector and the need to drive an external screen. Making everybody's phone $20 more expensive is only worthwhile if a significant fraction of the your buyers will also buy the "shell".
I claim that every mobile device should be completely independent and it's surprising to me that iPhones are still tied so closely to iTunes.
Trying to keep two computers in sync is a pain in the ass whether there are wires or not.
True, but you need to do it anyway regardless of this particular instance. I want my phone and my ipod and my gmail account and my GPS device to have the same address book without requiring supervision.
This is a pretty interesting idea because it speaks to the tight integration within a Android or iOS system. For example:
* The shell tablet would also need a way to pipe multi-touch input back into the core system/phone.
* The core system/phone would need to support an entirely different screen size/resolution.
We already have phones with 1Ghz processors, and web apps that are reducing the need for big local resources. How soon before I can just have one single device and nothing to sync?
But, still, I often find using the two together to be advantageous and wouldn't want to not have that option.