[badloginagain]

I was always under the impression that convergence for the end user meant having the same 'computer' spread across many devices. That your phone has access to the same files as your laptop as your tablet. That identity and rights management was shared and unified across all devices. That your devices natively formed a network, a sandboxed cloud.

I never understood it all looking the same, having a shared UI. The screen real-estate and input are too different to make a unified presentation. My biggest complaint about Windows 10 is that the power user on a laptop suffers for the imagined mobile user.

The funny part is, focusing on shared data and identity brings you closer to convergence than an elegant UI does.

[soneil]

I have to agree that sharing the UI seems like a dead-end.

We saw this in the leap from WinCE to the iPhone, and from tablets that were essentially laptops with the monitor facing outwards, to iOS & android tablets. Besides the hardware finally getting to the right place, designing the UI for the experience was a huge leap.

"Convergence" feels far too much like trying to compromise one to suit the other, right when we've finally learnt not to do that.

[swiley]

I totally disagree actually. With relative position pointing (except for the onscreen keyboard) desktop UIs actually are significantly more usable (not to mention, often more responsive) on my android than the phone centric android GUIs.

The only problem with this is that SDL X11 eats the battery.