Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

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This keeps being postponed. For some reason Chrome OS isn’t being ported to Android devices. Motorola tried their take. Microsoft tried the windows phone thingy. Nokia had the N900 Linux phones. Even Android was supposed to run a Windows 11 VM just fine. Microsoft killed the Surface Neo. There was a phone shaped Windows PC called the Emporium or something, killed too.

This whole space has been cursed. You can hack some old Nokias or Androids to run windows on arm and have driver issues. You can use a handheld pc console like the GPD Win and get the LTE addon. But there’s no “this phone is a PC“ offering that is really viable.

I suppose having a Pinephone and running Linux is the best option right now.

I used a lap dock for a while (UPERFECT) which allowed me to plug a device via usb c and it would turn the phone into a basic laptop.

I wish there were serious efforts.

> For some reason Chrome OS isn’t being ported to Android devices.

ChromeOS is actively being re-implemented to run on top of the Android kernel.

Reasons for this may range from merely wanting to minimize kernel/driver work, to something more strategic, and nobody high enough up that chain to know seems to be willing to risk their NDA.

> This keeps being postponed.

> there’s no “this phone is a PC“ offering that is really viable.

> I wish there were serious efforts.

You should really google "Samsung Dex".

I've used it plenty. In fact it's what I used primarily on the lap dock. However, I think it's pretty poor. Android apps really don't feel natural in windows. The window management is generally poor. I like pinning windows to half of the screen, using keyboard shortcuts. Having a consistent clipboard across apps. I think it's an ok solution, but everything runs a bit slow and feels stilted. It doesn't help that wireless solutions have pretty severe refresh rate and lag issues, and usb c makes the setup a bit inelegant. It came in handy a few times that I wanted to do text input and my phone wouldn't be ideal. That's it.

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