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by ge0rg 5179 days ago
I do want an all-in-one solution, like outlined in the article.

A smartphone with enough power to run "regular" applications and a dock I can plug it into for charging, peripherals and a monitor.

Of course the current smartphone OSes are not suitable for that task, as is demonstrated by the Transformer series, among others.
2 comments
bad_user 5179 days ago
Why can't an OS like Android be an all-in-one solution anyway?

See: http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and...

Also, another approach is to make your phone start a desktop OS, such as Ubuntu, once connected to a monitor, mouse and keyboard:

http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

Which would essentially be just like regular dual-booting known to geeks, but simplified to make the switch instantly after you dock your phone.

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DanBC 5179 days ago
A smartphone that is able to hook up to a keyboard and monitor and run a simple word processor and spreadsheet; and some calendar / scheduling software; and some email thing (either cloud based web client or traditional server client) - that's a smart phone that many people would buy.

Supporting it in the enterprise environment would be tricky. You don't want users loading their phones with malware and then bringing that infected phone inside the network.

And, really, I'd be happy if the phone was decoupled from the rest of it. A phone and something like Raspberry PI would do me fine.

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freehunter 5179 days ago
Supporting it in the enterprise environment would be tricky. You don't want users loading their phones with malware and then bringing that infected phone inside the network.

This happens today even with corporate laptops. If they're allowed outside, they will get infected. Working in information security, I send a few form emails each month telling someone to call the helpdesk and get their computer reimaged. If the company has a good enough network team to know how to properly segment a network (and/or implement a reverse proxy) and a security team with enough resources to monitor network traffic, the risk becomes acceptable.

Basically what you describe is BYOD, and it gives me job security :) For the record, I would totally buy the same desktop on three form factors if the same apps and same data could be synced across all of them.

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Roritharr 5179 days ago
Checkout Motorola WebTop, its exactly that.
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