[LINK] Phone as laptop

[Tom Worthington]

stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> Maybe soon another trend .. your phone as your personal computer ... 
> -- Atrix 4G: Faux Laptop With a Phone For Brains FEBRUARY 17, 2011
> The Wall Street Journal  http://online.wsj.com ... laptop dock, which
> looks like a netbook ... costs $500 ...

The laptop dock is essentially a netbook computer which has been 
reprogrammed to only work when connected to a particular model of smart 
phone.

It would be cheaper to buy an ordinary netbook (they are down to $300), 
or a tablet computer, and use it with the smart phone of your choice.

You could use WiFi to allow the netbook to use the smart phone as a 
wireless modem, to connect to the Internet. This arrangement would be 
more flexible as the netbook (or tablet computer) would be fully 
functional without the smart phone, so you could use it with a free WiFi 
service and save your smart phone.

To make this simpler, you could select a netbook and smart phone with 
the same operating system (such as Google Android), but this is not 
really necessary, as data can be portable. You could sync data between 
the netbook and the smart phone. But if you are using "cloud" based 
applications, you do not need to do that as the netbook and smart phone 
can access the same online storage.

A cheaper option would be to use your smart phone as a desktop computer. 
When at my desk I plug my low cost netbook into a full size keyboard, 
mouse and LCD screen. This should now be possible with a smart phone 
which has a USB port and video out socket. You would just need a low 
cost USB hub, to be able to plug the mouse, keyboard and a printer in at 
the same time and perhaps an adaptor cable from the phone's tiny video 
socket to the desktop monitor.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra