Future Androids may let you dock them and use them as a desktop – as standard
  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    2•5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Android 10 gained a hidden desktop mode in its developer features, but it wasn’t easy to find.

    While PCs are still plagued with proprietary wireless mice and keyboards, some can be switched to Bluetooth mode, like this inexpensive unit which the Reg FOSS desk uses when travelling.

    Even budget-model phones are capably specced: this vulture’s sub-£300 device has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of flash, and with USB-C everywhere there’s no need to faff around with converters or adapters.

    If you don’t need any special hardware or software – as is increasingly the case now – can plug a cheapo keyboard and mouse into the back of your monitor and plug the phone into that, we suspect that this could prove to be a more popular option than fancier vendor-specific offerings of a few years ago.

    A phone might make a somewhat clunky laptop, but oddly enough a perfectly serviceable desktop if you don’t need to buy any additional kit for it to work.

    Being of an open sourcey persuasion, we’d love to see this sort of thing supported in replacement phone OSes such as postmarketOS or Ubuntu Touch.

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