Can the Atrix 4G Really Become Your Next PC? 297
GMGruman writes "The Motorola Atrix 4G got a lot of attention at CES because of its ability to dock to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and run the full desktop Firefox browser in addition to its Android apps. Now that it is shipping, I took the Atrix 4G and its Multimedia Dock and related peripherals out this week for a test-drive to see if delivers on this 'post-PC' promise. The verdict: It's a good first half-step toward mobile devices being your primary computer. The end of the Windows hegemony is in sight."
single page link... (Score:5, Informative)
Single page link...
http://www.infoworld.com/print/152843 [infoworld.com]
Re:single page link... (Score:4, Funny)
Who authorized this story? Why wasn't I notified that there was going to be a pro-Android story on the front page?
Somebody get the Apple Nation on the line. We need some trolls here, STAT! Go! Go! Go! We're bleeding here, people!
Re:single page link... (Score:4, Interesting)
No point, the author is obviously an idiot who has no idea what he's talking about.
"When you dock the Atrix, the Firefox browser and other dock-provided services aren't running from the Atrix but instead from a stripped-down Linux PC inside the dock. A real post-PC device would run everything from the smartphone or tablet, and it would use the dock to add more processing or take advantage of peripherals."
The stripped down Linuxy interface might make it seem that way, but that's not really the case...
"Running the Atrix's native Android apps on the big screen proved disappointing. All you get is a blown-up version of the Atrix's screen in a window. Android apps such as Quickoffice don't adjust to take advantage of the bigger screen as you would expect -- unlike many iOS apps when run on an iPad [12] instead of an iPhone [13]. For the "lite" PC concept to work, native Android apps will have to take advantage of the larger screen, keyboard, and mouse. Otherwise, you're paying essentially just to have a desktop browser run off your smartphone."
Because QuickOffice and all the other Android apps were surely designed with desktop use in mind, sure... it's not like the Atrix is the first device of its kind and software makers would need a little time to catch up, huh? Not to mention that the Android apps being shown on the screen are shown by way of simple screencasting - no point in doing anything else as the touch interface isn't there anyway.
Sounds like this guy didn't really do much research before buying. All the stuff in the article was pretty much in, well, any normal review of the Atrix. I was hoping for a little more perspective as to installing a more full featured Linux ARM build as the Webtop... which is pretty much the only way I could imagine using the Atrix as a PC. Although come to think of it, custom software on a Motorola device is very unlikely... I'm sure they've locked down and encrypted the webtop in some way as well.
Not as long as it's done in a crippled way. (Score:3, Funny)
If it was done with something a bit more open than Android, it might have a shot at replacing netbooks.
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Re:Not as long as it's done in a crippled way. (Score:5, Interesting)
How about something more original, like docking into a tablet?
Re:Not as long as it's done in a crippled way. (Score:5, Interesting)
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and your reason why tablets have taken this long to work into the market place and why ever version up until now has sucked.
You can't imagine your way out of a paper bag.
a tablet will never replace your desktop it isn't meant to. if you think it will your wrong. It is a complement. a secondary or tertiary device. do you have one sheet of paper one pencil and one ruler to work with? Or do you have multiple pens/ pencils, dozens of sheets of paper, rulers, compasses, squares, scissors tape, paper clips, e
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You can't imagine your way out of a paper bag.
...
a tablet isn't going to be your only computer.
Wow! The contradiction is mind boggling!
Can't you imagine a future where tablets are powerful enough to be many people's only computer?
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That's because now laptops are as powerful as desktops, but are smaller, lighter and more portable. You may still need a desktop to run your high-end gaming system for example. But now there is a choice. When tablets and other devices become as powerful as the laptops then they might supplant them, but at the moment they complement.
Portable Media Players, e-book readers, cameras (e.g. digital SLRs), games consoles, PVRs, mobile phones, tablets, desktops, laptops, and other devices have different markets as
Also what's the point? (Score:2)
I fail to see the reason behind having your phone as the be-all, end-all of computing. Let's say it was possible, let's say a phone could run everything you want, play all your media, etc, etc. No compromises. I STILL think we'd have other systems. Why? Convenience if nothing else.
For example: Suppose your phone is your media player. Easy enough, HDMI out and a powerful enough processor and there you go. Wonderful! Watch all your media anywhere... Except now when your kids want to watch a movie, you have to
The Nokia N8 (Score:2)
HDMI output, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Dolby 5.1 surround sound. Plus the standard apps; word processor, calendar etc etc etc..
And this is today.
The pocket is the new desktop, and guess what MS effectively bought (for $0), the largest mobile phone producer in the world.
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Yeah. Having used Maemo for the last year, I think that would be awesome with a full sized keyboard and screen. Or Meego i guess (haven't used it). I had a play with LXDE on my n900 and apart from the processor being to slow for it to be practical, it showed some promise. The new generation of ARM chips would cope a lot better, methinks.
While Android is great for phones/tablets, I kind of think trying to run it as a desktop is a bit square peg meets round hole.
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You are missing the point. No mobile browser trying to cope with a huge (by phone standards) screen, regular Firefox. Give folks some time to hack and even if Moto doesn't ship it out of the box you will have Openoffice.org (or whatever fork ends up shipping) and not some pocket mostly view only app that can muddle through a Word doc. Adobe's normal desktop Reader is only a recompile away, enough users holler and it will turn up. And so on. Moto was afraid to just turn loose a normal Linux desktop on t
Who cares about open? (Score:2)
- Have wireless charging so I can leave it in my pocket and have a charger in my chair
- Have wireless HDMI (whatever flavor is the flavor of the week)
- Have wireless USB (bluetooth is too damn complex and even still doesn't work worth a shit) for keyboard, mouse, e
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I would like a MeeGo phone that doubles as a portable PC. Unlike Android it's got a full standard GNU/Linux stack, including an X-server.
Moto's crippled bootloader (Score:3)
Being able to download the kernel, driver, and Android sources directly from Motorola, the maker of my Droid phone, is so prohibitive.
Good luck getting your recompiled kernel+driver+Android sources past the well-locked-down bootloader on any Motorola Android device newer than the original Droid.
Re:Moto's crippled bootloader (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to download the kernel, driver, and Android sources directly from Motorola, the maker of my Droid phone, is so prohibitive.
Good luck getting your recompiled kernel+driver+Android sources past the well-locked-down bootloader on any Motorola Android device newer than the original Droid.
Fair enough. However, this is not Android's (the OS) fault - the bootloader locking mechanism is hardware based, so only Motorola's to blame here. As always in these cases, all you can do is vote with your wallet: get a HTC or some other brand that doesn't lock you out of your property.
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Moto isn't the only ones doing this. Try updating a Samsung Behold 2 to Android 2.x.
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Methinks it's your carrier
Unfortunately, in the United States, the general rule is the better the coverage, the more locked down the phones are, and the less likely the carrier is to offer a discount on service for bringing your own. A lot of people have carriers with undesirable lockdown policies because the good guys [t-mobile.com] can't get a signal to them.
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Moto is by far the worst culprit so far. HTC has refrained (so far) from measures as extreme as booting only signed kernels, and Samsung seems to allow one to roll back to older bootloaders quite easily (which also don't check kernel signatures)...
We'll see what the next batch brings, but I have a feeling HTC have already caught on...
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Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to vote with their wallets when buying their first Android device. When the Droid X came out with the locked bootloader, I and many other people (mostly annoyed Milestone owners like me, I suppose) spent time posting comments on EVERY article we could find about the damned thing, warning people not to buy if they wanted to be able to change their system in any way... seriously, there's not an article out there from the Droid X launch that doesn't have somebody yelli
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Wake me up when Motorola gives more than the middle finger to modders. Having a ROM that has to run by kexec(), after modders spend hundreds of man hours defanging the device of eFuses and other crap shows Moto isn't really interested in making open devices.
I really wish Motorola would stop being hostile to modders. Even if they offered a modder-friendly device for a little bit more, that would be a faire compromise.
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Motorola Xoom is fully unlockable with no dirty tricks. But then it's a "Google experience device", so Moto was really only responsible for hardware there.
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It's unfortunate for us but there'll always be a demand for locked phones. Services like Netflix will never officially appear on a device which is completely open to modification.
And there's the whole corporate market -- many corporations have a legal mendate (or just corporate policy) to keep email secure and the only devices they can allow to connect to their mail servers on ones that they can enforce a password lock policy that allows remote wipe and auto-wipe after a number of unlock fails.
A rooted phone can allow the user to violate these policies.
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Virtually all Android phones can be rooted. However, there is a difference between a "#" prompt and being able to flash your own ROM freely without needing to kexec() from a signed kernel.
The best compromise would be something VMWare showed a few months ago -- keeping the business data in a VM, while the user could do what they wanted with the real phone. Of course, someone can crack this, but someone will end up rooting phones, so might as well have the user experience more tolerable with a device.
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Why would you want access to Motorola's crappy sources?
The problem with Motorola devices and their locked down bootloaders is that you can't get RID of Motorola's software and replace it with something decent (AOSP or CyanogenMod, for instance)...
Re:Not as long as it's done in a crippled way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah. I forgot that 'Openness' is what makes or breaks products in the marketplace.
Let's see, open vs. closed:
Internet vs. AOL
CD vs. minidisc
Linux vs. UNIX
gzip/lzma/bzip2 vs. bzip
OpenSSH vs. SSH
OpenSSL vs. anything closed
AES vs. anything closed
Apache vs. IIS
Yup, that sounds about right.
Almost everything you use won because it's open, you just don't notice it anymore because it won so long ago that it just seems like part of the scenery now. DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, C++, Kerberos, LDAP, 802.3, 802.11, USB, the BSD sockets API, etc. etc. All things equal, customers prefer open to closed. Which means that closed is a state that can only exist prior to an open competitor reaching compatibility and substantial feature parity with the leading closed alternative, at which point customers choose the open alternative.
The only way closed is a long-term condition is when it is propped up by a monopoly, a cartel or a government.
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There is one exception, and I am assuming the devil's advocate role here:
Microsoft Exchange. It is not an open source product, but finding a company that is not dependent on Exchange (especially if they have to deal with PCI/DSS2, SOX, HIPAA, FERPA, or other regs) is a rare exception.
Of course, Google and IBM are exceptions, but pretty much Exchange is the only game in town if one wants to get past basic E-mail.
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There is one exception
There is considerably more than one exception - MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Windows, OS X... On and on.
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Windows is closed source, but it allows open development. It's also worth considering that Linux only became easy enough for Average Joes (or even geeks with no previous *nix experience) in the last decade.
Re:Not as long as it's done in a crippled way. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is considerably more than one exception - MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Windows, OS X... On and on.
Sure, there are exceptions, but are they really exceptions or did open just not win yet?
There was a time when AOL was the most popular ISP. There was a time when the main alternative to proprietary UNIX for a server OS was Novell Netware.
And certain markets take longer. Software which is very specialized in particular, so Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc. But it's only because the open alternative correspondingly attracts fewer developers and therefore takes longer to reach feature parity. Right now GIMP isn't on par with Photoshop. But it's not like Photoshop from 2011 is light years ahead of Photoshop from 2006. Can you say GIMP won't have substantially caught up in five years? In ten years? And can you imagine anyone paying four figures for Photoshop once it has?
Likewise, it's no surprise that more than half the software titles people are quoting at me are from Microsoft. Yes, Exchange, Office, Windows, these are still very popular. But it's not especially because they're great stuff that everybody loves, is it? It's because Microsoft has a dominant market position and long history of playing dirty. You can read the last line in my post above -- monopolies can keep things closed. Although even there, Microsoft is in a bit of a precarious position, because they don't have an external monopoly propping them up from the outside, they only have two internal ones that buttress each other. Which puts them in a bit of a spot if one or the other is ever dethroned -- you don't need Windows in order to run Office if you don't need Office, and conversely if Windows starts to decline then allowing Office to run on the new dominant platform will hasten Windows' demise, but refusing to will sink Office along with it.
Which pretty much leaves OS X...which I'm not sure makes a very good counterexample. It only has 10% market share in a market dominated by Microsoft, and Microsoft is uncharacteristically friendly to it (e.g. Office runs on it), so it seems to be in a fairly unrepresentative class. It'll be interesting to see what happens to it if Microsoft is ultimately dethroned, actually.
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iOS.
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one of the simpler reasons for such a long wait is patents
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I don't think this is really true. The trouble with software patents is that they're so broken that you can't even use them as designed.
I mean you go through all the effort of hiring a bunch of patent lawyers at five hundred dollars an hour, who in turn consume the time of your engineers that they could have spent engineering stuff but instead have to disclose their inventions to the lawyers. Then the lawyers spend (this is not an exaggeration) three years arguing wi
Re:Not as long as it's done in a crippled way. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Not as long as it's done in a crippled way. (Score:4, Insightful)
I weep for the 1% market. We never get what we want (at a price we can afford). Only the cool kids decide what crap becomes cheap.
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The market for the last 50 years has been dominated by devices that weren't intentionally crippled by their vendors.
There's lots of markets. Which market, exactly, do you speak of?
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Symbian open? You realise you have to pay to get access to half the SDKs, right?
You mean, is the PC dead? (Score:2)
I think the answer is obvious. YES. It's the year of the linux desktop.
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Obviously if you cant do it 'in the cloud' you're either doing it wrong or its something illegal.
I can't get to the end of that sentence without my mind wandering and wondering to what mysterious things this euphemism is referring.
Can it run my Steam games? (Score:2, Insightful)
Then no, it won't replace my PC.
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Exactly, As long as theres PC gamers, there will be PCs.
PC are not dead.... not for a long time.
Yes, PC's are not going anywhere within the next 5 years. But as for games, phones play games as well. I don't know if you've been paying attention, but hottest processor coming out for phones is an nvidia designed, quad-core processor running at 1 GHz with integrated 3d acceleration and it is NOT hampered by the i386 instruction set we've been slave to for the past 20 years. Games will not be a problem. And the beauty of it is that you will be able to take the game with you, wherever you go and stay on
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You seriously think we'll be playing Far Cry 3 or WoW 2 on our smartphones? Please.
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NFW (Score:2, Informative)
The Atrix -- which costs $199 with a two-year contract from AT&T Wireless in the United States -- ...
Shove it!
Landline + dumbphone + home Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
The Atrix -- which costs $199 with a two-year contract from AT&T Wireless in the United States -- ...
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Shove it!
Quoted for truth. Adding a monthly cell phone plan can be expensive for people who are currently happy with the combination of a bare-bones land line, a dumbphone with $5/mo service for those few calls that can't wait (such as arranging a ride home), a PDA or netbook that gets Wi-Fi, and home Internet access allowing more than single-digit GB/mo.
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Such people obviously aren't the market for a bloody smart phone.
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Don't forget to add on the fact that you are locked into the revision of Android Motorola has placed on the device unless they feel like blessing you with an upgrade. Punitive measures like signing the kernel serve no one's purposes but Motorola's, and is a downgrade in capability compared to a regular PC simply from an ownership standpoint.
The question is (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, because the "Ooops we accidentally deleted your emails" from Google and also Hotmail a while back, plus countless other examples from other "cloud" providers, establish beyond a doubt the trustworthiness of the "cloud"... Nah, I will keep my desktop for now, thanks.
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Cloud service reliability will only get better. A total loss of data is still *much* less likely with data stored on my hard drive. Granted, regular backups would help a lot, but I'm too lazy.
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Err, data loss is *more* likely on my hard disk.
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Real convergence (Score:4, Interesting)
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Do you know anyone that has actually tried developing for MeeGo?
Apparently the WeTab [wetab.mobi] has MeeGo installed, and a bunch of software do go with it, so somebody must be. (And if they didn't only sell in Germany and the Netherlands, I would be as well).
Interesting... (Score:2)
When you dock the Atrix, the Firefox browser and other dock-provided services aren't running from the Atrix but instead from a stripped-down Linux PC inside the dock.
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So it's not actually doing away with anything, and actually requires a full fledged PC to do those things? Sounds like a non-story.
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Not interesting, just wrong.
Thunderbolt (Score:2)
I wonder if this is where Apple is headed with Thunderbolt (née Light Peak) ? A thunderbolt-equipped iPhone could drive a large external display and still have a seperate 10 Gbps multi protocol data channel left over which to drive peripherals, which is plenty fast.
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You better go look at their balance sheet. They make about $600/iPhone and about $300/iPad.
It doesn't run on the phone? (Score:5, Insightful)
So I was reading the article and thinking "$400 for the laptop module? $200 + peripherals for the dock? Those are the equivalent of a cheap laptop/PC" Then I got to this tidbit:
What? Why the heck am I buying this thing? All you're selling is an ultra-underpowered, crippled Linux computer that only works when a weird phone is plugged in for no particular reason. Syncing open tabs in FireFox is nice, but that's not enough. A simple app could do that. At home, I can keep a computer no problem. On the go, I still have to keep your laptop dock thing, so no space savings there.
Then there are other downsides. I'm guessing it drains the battery faster to use the laptop dock thing. The pictures of the laptop dock make it look really easy to snap the phone off the back accidentally and break the phone/dock. It's nice to know the reviewer doesn't think the thing feels secure in the dock.
This seems to be where computers will go for most people, but this first implementation clearly sounds more like a beta product than a first generation.
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The dock has its own battery so it shouldn't drain the phone.
Accessing information on the phone from the dock is interesting, though a wireless option with something faster than bluetooth would be nice. The phone also acts as the data connection for the dock which could also be made wireless.
I'm not sure about calling it beta rather than first gen but there are areas that could be improved. Hopefully we can get a standard. Then phones will be able to easily interface with cars which is happening, but the
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This seems to be where computers will go for most people, but this first implementation clearly sounds more like a beta product than a first generation.
Agreed, but it's a step in the right direction. Being able to carry just a cell phone, and no laptop would be great. But my phone is never going to replace a good desktop at home, if you need one.
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I have a laptop for surfing/typing, a router for networking, a few Arduinos for hacking, a rack of servers for Real Work (TM), and if I wanted to play games with awesome graphics I would probably break down and use a console.
You can pay for and maintain all of that, or you can buy a decent desktop.
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This will take off once the dock is replaced with a wireless connection.
Re:It doesn't run on the phone? (Score:4, Informative)
When you dock the Atrix, the Firefox browser and other dock-provided services aren't running from the Atrix but instead from a stripped-down Linux PC inside the dock. A real post-PC device would run everything from the smartphone or tablet, and it would use the dock to add more processing or take advantage of peripherals."
From everything I've read, this is patently untrue. The browser runs on the phone 'webtop'. There are those on XDA-developers that have already figured out how to get the 'webtop' to start even without the laptop dock connected and instead display to HDMI.
Anyway, I don't agree with many of your conclusions, but I do agree the peripherials are overpriced - as I would expect for a first of it's kind product.
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It's not true, the guy who wrote the article just doesn't seem to have any idea what he's talking about. The info in there (the bits that are correct, at least) could have been gleaned completely from early reviews or even the previews on the various gadget blogs...
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Next PC? (Score:2)
My N900 is the computer i use more in a way or another most days. But it don't replace my PC, complements it. Sometimes i need far more horsepower, memory, and bigger screen and input devices than my phone, and in that tasks the Atrix would fall short too. I don't know if future devices (using i.e. the Sixth Sense [ted.com] approach?) will improve a lot input and output of information for small devices, that coupled with improvements in battery, cpu and memory could make the PC less needed.
Maybe im using PC too muc
No.. but (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it can't. But it can replace your netbook or maybe a low powered notebook.
That's a good thing.
But the smartphone market will give a good kick in the arse to intel/AMD to start releasing much better hardware, for less money, to keep the desktop well ahead of the smartphone game. A brand new 900 dollar phone (600 + dock) is roughly on par with a 700 dollar laptop. That's pretty appealing. Desktops, well, I just priced out a bunch of desktops in the 1600-2000 dollar range, which are easily 10x more powerful, so if you have any use for the power, no, the phone won't do it.
10 years ago we passed the point of the hardware making much difference to a word processor. And we aren't quite at the point where the average desktop user can just dictate to their computer (though we're close, I managed a several setups like that for students with disabilities), and pretty much anything can web browse. Until software that people would use everyday catches up to hardware there's probably a market for a phone that replaces a desktop, and then we'll go back to a desktops. It's hurt intel and AMD I think that while transistor density may still be doubling every 18 ish months performance isn't. Core 2 -> i7->sandy bridge is like 20% performace gains clock for clock, at each step, and the clocks aren't much faster, and there aren't even more cores (because nothing uses 6 cores well yet, let alone 8, 12 or 16). HTML 5, and google's native code over the web etc. *might* change things a bit, giving people instant access to stuff. But all the great technologies we're touting, colour e-book readers, mp3 players, phones that can run programs aren't exactly great performance wise. I could read PDF's just as well 15 years ago as I can today, play music maybe 12 years ago as well as I can today, and any computer can run programs. The phone guys have done a good job using the web to make software accessible, but if the desktop guys could pull of the same there'd be demand there (and as someone else pointed out, my Steam games collection isnt' about to run on a phone).
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Stuff like games, video editing, photo editing etc. Just because you and I don't use it, doesn't mean the model won't catch on in 5 or 6 years, I don't buy any games on the iTunes store, despite being a game developer and having an iPhone. The walled garden thing seems to be quite popular. In the time 150k apps were made for Android how many were made for Windows 7 (not the phone, just windows 7)? I have no clue, because no one tracks it. Which ones are good, well, I know some of them, but I'm sure th
Get a USB hub (Score:2)
but if you're using the dock in a living room with your HDMI-equipped TV, adding USB cables in the mix could be awkward.
That's what USB hubs are for. Buy a USB hub and a 16-foot cable to the TV, and it'll reach your TV tray with no problem.
Further, using a USB keyboard means you'll lack the special Android keys (Menu, Home, Search, and Back) and will need to rely on the mouse to access their on-screen equivalents.
Then that's a defect in the port of Android. It should have used the menu key of a 104-key keyboard (between right Alt and right Control) for menu, Win+F for search, Win+Left or Win+Backspace for back, and Win for home. The author doesn't appear to mention having tried a "multimedia keyboard" either.
Android apps such as Quickoffice don't adjust to take advantage of the bigger screen as you would expect
Part of that is because the Android 2.3 certification requirements docume
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Price of mobile data (Score:2)
Storage? just use the cloud. How much space do you need in a consumer device now that media is generally streamed?
At typical U.S. prices for 3G data at single-digit GB per month? Lots.
the future probably isn't so much with a dock that allows for bigger and better I/O as it is a way to connect the smartphone to the PC so the actual run state of a program can be shifted from one device to another similar to dragging a window between screens of a multi monitor setup.
Which, if you read the featured article, is very much how Firefox on this device works.
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Didn't get that far... I get really annoyed by articles that are split into pages just to get more ad hits.
Already been done: Celio Redfly (Score:2)
Depends on the device (Score:2)
A Motorola Atrix 4G? No, probably not. A Sony NGP-class device with quad-core CPU and quad-core GPU? Depending on the connectivity, quite possibly, for the majority of tasks. If it's got hardware accelerated HD video & flash, can attach to fast storage through the dock, I think most people wouldn't know the difference. The average person surfing the web, streaming video, using Facebook and email, and playing the latest pointless Zynga game, definitely not going to be a problem.
Are hardcore gamers going
Name too similar ... (Score:2)
Wow, this reviewer is REALLY trying to like it (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy is stretching and distorting the truth to make the review positive.
An example, he only mentions the SUBSIDIZED cost of the phone but uses this price further on to compare it to a netbook BUT does NOT then use a subsidized netbook which do exist. This is like comparing two cars and taking the lease cost of one as being different from the purchase cost of the other. Well duh.
He then claims that 400 dollars for the dock is cheaper then a netbook... except a netbook is both complete and not just a dock and 400 dollars is also the mid range price for a netbook. Was he looking at Vaoi's perhaps? I can find 200-300 dollar netbooks with ease and totally "free" ones if I buy them with a phone subscription.
He then goes on about Firefox Linux not being able to run Java. Is that so? Gosh, what am I running then? What he really means to say is that this dock can't run java apparently for some reason. Firefox and Linux can't this hardware he is trying to like can't.
Really, the most standard, cheapest netbook can do what this thing does and WAY more. Even the multimedia dock is expensive. I still have all the cost and hassle of carrying a netbook besides my phone but without any of the advantages. Like oh say multiple video outs because on the move I can't always dictate what inputs are available for a screen.
And this thing as far as I read the review can't even do video. What a LOT of people seem to want netbooks to do is output video, considering the demand for 720p capability which the first netbooks lacked. What is this multimedia dock going to do for me on the move?
We have heard the "PC is dying" speech before and so far, it hasn't happened. That is because the PC, netbooks and laptops are very very good at serving the edge cases, all those uses to which we put our hardware that some exec at MS/HP/Apple or whatever didn't dream off. Just compare Android's gmail app with regular gmail AND especially a tricked out desktop with gmail tied in. It is clear gmail the app is the light edition. Sometimes that is handy but only if the ease of mobile access makes up for the restrictions.
But if I need a bag to carry a dock or whatever around, why not just carry a cheapo netbook and be done with it.
To me, a phone as a PC will only become intresting if I can skip the dock and hookup the phone directly. THEN I can use it as a tiny laptop.
The end of the Wintel domination? Not yet in sight. With efforts like this, I doubt it ever will. Come on, would it have been that hard to implement some more basic Linux apps?
Ya well (Score:2)
For some reason there's a ton of people who are just obsessed with the idea of a smartphone as the One Computer to Rule Them All(tm). They want a single device that replaces their desktop, laptop, DVD player, MP3 player, and so on and think a smartphone will be it. They've never stopped to consider the downsides of this even if such a thing did work perfectly (which as you noted it doesn't). There are plenty of reasons to want more than one device, ones that are better at some things than others.
However bec
Not when it has a $50+ data plan per device (Score:2)
Not when it has a $50+ data plan per device.
ATT DataConnect 4G is $50 for 5GB then $10 per GIG.
And they are selling this with a a two-year contract.
What's the point? (Score:2)
I don't see the point of this phone -- why run apps from the phone at all when it's in the dock? Put a powerful processor in the dock and run the apps on the (presumably much faster) dock processor when the phone is docked -- mount the filesystem from the phone so all of your files are available.
Running apps (except firefox) from the phone itself seems like a gimmick that doesn't really accomplish anything useful.
Considered and rejected (Score:2)
For a long time, I was really excited about this.
However, I can't bring myself to commit to a two-year contract (with a maximum of 4 GB of data costs me an extra $50 per month) when my phone does what I need it to do now.
Besides, in the next 8-10 months, phones with 28nm transistors and quad cores will be around. Not that I'm waiting on the technology, but when I do buy into it, it's going to be for something worth it to me.
For Sure (Score:2)
The end of the Windows hegemony is in sight.
Where?
Over there!
Still can't see it.
It's right beside the year of the linux desktop!
Ok.
O.o (Score:2)
My next PC? Somehow I don't see a toy like that replacing a triple-screen 3D workstation.
Re:Ahaha. Atrix next PC. (Score:4, Funny)
Oh Bill, get a sense of humor.
Re: (Score:3)
Jesus wept.
Online LaTeX providers? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I am a developer and a researcher. I install (and uninstall) softwares day in and day out.
I'm with you there, but...
So the question really is can it become mainstream?
Wait, what? You just said you're a developer and a researcher. You're not even close to mainstream. This thing becoming mainstream is entirely orthogonal to whether it can replace a PC for you.
I'd rather it didn't become mainstream, but that's not really up to us.
Re: (Score:2)
Your idea is missing standardized connection. Then you could have docking stations setup else where for business use.
Plug your phone into a dock at Kinko's to access the presentation you were working on during your flight and print out new handouts.
Sit down into an Internet cafe and enjoy your office while following up with some leads via email on a full desktop experience. When you are done disconnect and none of your data is left cached on the system you were working on.
Add this to hotels catering to bu
Re: (Score:2)