This was precisely the target of the Motorola Atrix. They sold a netbook-like "shell" with a monitor and keyboard, and when you plugged the Atrix smartphone in it became an Ubuntu webtop device.
Which is precisely why I would expect it to be the start of such a discussion. The "use your smartphone as your PC" thing has been attempted again and again for, as you said, 13 years. Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want.
That seems hugely important to such a conversation.
There's so many reasons why it's hard to say this is really unwanted. Atrix was a boutique not mainstream product so who knows what would have happened had it been generally usable.
At the time we didn't have anything like usb-c, so it was all special peripherals and displays. Now though a decent % of displays do have USB-c with power, and that's totally different starting conditions. Especially if that display also has a keyboard and mouse plugged in, which many do!
Commercial success requires paving of cow paths, needs a low impedance route to mass success. We haven't been in a spot where that's ever been remotely possible before.
Do I think Android on display is going to totally take over & dominate soon? No, no I don't. But mass availability and a world capable of supporting - making use of this capability has just arrived, and this really lets us get started with these ubiquitous & pervasive computing ideas that, so far/until now, have had to be bespoke offering.
Different but also similar, it feels like game streaming has some reasonable popularity too now, and it's another case of using interconnect across devices & peripherals that I think a lot of people have really grown into & deeply enjoy being able to do. It's still a small segment of people, relatively, but to me it speaks of adoption curves & how success is often extremely slow, how there are real fans who feel great joy & happiness, without the rest of the world being much tuned in or aware.
Modularity was probably a big deal once upon a time because of hardware costs and the difficulty of synchronization. I'm just not sure it's been that that for a long time. Even the iPad which I somewhat hesitantly bought with a keyboard (and pencil) for a versatile travel device, I'm not totally convinced I couldn't have stuck with mu old MacBook Pro for most purposes.
> Generally it's a commercial failure because it turns out that isn't something most people want.
What the people definitely didn't want was the performance of 2011 smartphone for desktop. The use case didn't fail, that device failed because the limits at the time made the phone desktop impractical. And I remember it not being a stellar smartphone either.
But every smartphone also failed until they didn't fail anymore because they were good enough. Phones today have astounding levels of performance so they can easily serve as desktops.
Starting the discussion from impractical attempts made "ages" ago (in tech terms) is a nice bit of historical trivia but not an indictment of the "phone desktop" idea. It's like starting every discussion about EVs with how early 20th century EVs failed because people don't want EVs.
I don't think performance is the only problem. The software is at least as much of an issue.
What kind of software environment do you expect when you connect your mouse, keyboard and 22" screen to a device where everything is geared toward touch input on a 6" screen?
It's not an unsolvable problem and I do think there is demand for it if done right. But it's not a solved problem either.
The iPad is a perfectly usable machine with keyboard and mouse, and it's quite popular so that's a good general model to aim for. Even running some remote desktop (thin client mode) could be a great feature and productivity boost.
> it's not a solved problem either
Never said it is. But we can't use one experience from the baby years of the smartphone to proclaim what won't work or won't have demand today. If we never try to solve a problem, especially because "it didn't work on the first attempt ages ago", then we'll never solve a problem.
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/motorola-atrix-4g-att
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/motorola-atrix-the-u...
This was precisely the target of the Motorola Atrix. They sold a netbook-like "shell" with a monitor and keyboard, and when you plugged the Atrix smartphone in it became an Ubuntu webtop device.