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An issue with mobile UX is that it's tricky to maintain 'ambient awareness'. How do you 'keep an eye' on Slack? You have to foreground it & disable screen locking, or get push notifications.
On desktop you can just alt+tab to it every so often, plus the taskbar icon lights up.
I sometimes use Chrome on desktop to address a similar requirement (they have a feature to 'pin' a tab, so you can have GMail plus stuff like WhatsApp pinned.)
Would be cool if there was a cheap always-on tablet that could display arbitrary web widgets like a calendar, slack etc
Just thinking about this ambient computing thing reminds me of the ‘Chumby’, a cute smart alarm clock from the early 2000s.
Apparently the Amazon Echo Show is a bit of a successor. And I came across a wall-mounted calendar display called ‘Dakboard’ (it’s like $400 though.)
I have a use case that sounds ridiculously lazy, but I guess has been a problem for me for most of this decade: I need to know the time in various cities without doing any work besides a glance
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Addendum: over the last couple days I've been looking into stuff like Arduino, Raspberry Pi etc but re-using a Kindle is cool if you don't want to do a whole electronics project