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Comment by keithpeter | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Shuttleworth is right. In a few years time we will have cheap smartphones available with an OS that allows docking to a monitor/keyboard unit with automatic switching of UI. Cloud + local storage. SIM card in the device rather than a myfi like the school project shown here.

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I think it's pretty much a given that we will be able to pack enough computing power into a phone to make it useful for average day to day internet/office tasks (arguably we are already there).

Whether that platform will be built out of a phone I don't know but it's probably likely as economies of scale on phone production do drive down the price of the hardware.

It's not going to replace a computer for everyone though (I like my three screens too much for that) but I could see the utility.

I wonder if the end of Moore's law will make it happen. If the difference between phone CPUs and laptop CPUs narrows enough, there'd be no reason not to use such a device.

Years ago we thought Apple was headed in this direction as well. There were rumors of "The Brick", which would be a phone-type device that would slot into a larger monitor and transform from a handheld into a PC, taking your same experience everywhere.

Turns out "The Brick" was just the singular aluminum ingot that the iMac is carved from.

At the time, I thought the thing you plug in would solely be an identification token + cache.

That would give us what Jobs said he had had for himself for years, in _1997_. See http://dcurt.is/steve-jobs-and-the-cloud

Isn't that pretty much what a Chromebook is, now? =)

2005 http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-co...

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