USB-C is that standard interface - when working at my desk I can plug a single USB-C cable into my laptop and it gains two monitors, external audio, keyboard, mouse, webcam, and all the other things you'd expect.

"One would thing that such an universal interface would quickly become a standard offering in airports, hotels, libraries, conferences, etc."

My favorite computing peripheral form factor has always been the PCMCIA card.

It seems to me that you could fit a minimum viable phone inside a PCMCIA card and then insert that PCMCIA card into a normal sized laptop when you choose.

The laptop would have no CPU/RAM - it's just a big USB keyboard and monitor - and the phone would probably have limited battery life, given the size (although you could bump out the non-port end of the PCMCIA card with some extra battery, the same way that wifi cards had an antenna bump ...)

Something like this was proposed ... there was some minor project where they had built an entire PC (not a phone) into a PCMCIA card (although with different pin-outs) and proposed using it as a portable "guts" for any laptop "host" but I can't find the URL for that project anymore ...

I certainly would welcome a phone the size of a pc-card and a cable-less docking of the brain into the host laptop would be much better than either 2-3 USB cables or some weird, proprietary phone dock ...

There was: the Apple 30-pin connector. It was revolutionary and got built into plenty of hotels where you can still see them. And where it acts as a warning to not build tech into your furniture again.

People keep building phone dock systems and they just don't really seem to take off. Maybe the best one available today is the HP Elite X3 .. running the discontinued Windows Phone.

AT&T killed that idea fast 6 years ago. When the Motorola Atrix came out with the ability to do that AT&T charge a $20 tethering fee to use the laptop dock with the phone! That blew my mind. The phone wasn't tethering data to anything but itself. https://www.wired.com/2011/03/motorola-atrix/

It's the natural desire in a free market to gain monopoly status and the desire to decrease the support matrix. Therefore most smartphone companies will try to log you into their own choice of OS. It's not an asshole move, it's just the most logical conclusion given the context they are in.

The way to get around that is supporting such kind of project (like fairphone, ubuntu mobile, linux on samsung) and gaining a true majority in the user base. However that is unlikely since for most people it's good enough to just run instagram, whatsapp and spotify. And for that the OS really doesn't matter.

*edit: I thought about something one can do also. Not an expert about these, but these very flat laptops like macbook air, I think they are underneath the keyboard also a smartphone/tablet. Buying these may increase the desire to create smaller and smaller computers. If what is labelled "computer" gets as small as a smart-phone that's also fine for our usecase, but it may be easier to digest for marketing people of these big corps.

There kinda was, hdmi+usb, just look at what Motorola was up to with Android years ago.

but then everyone got hung up on emulating Apple's dock plug, and things went backwards.

Display port over USB-C should be this, the Samsung Galaxy S8 was the first to support it.

Unfortunately, while quite a few docks are on the market, compatibility is a bit iffy, and rival USB-C alt modes like HDMI and MHL muddy the waters.

We are almost reaching tipping point here - my laptop is still more powerful than my phone, but only just. If USB-C can really support this connectivity (2 monitors, plus keyboard, mouse and a couple of usb ports), a really great implementation could work well.

I think Apple are the only company that can pull this off right now, everyone else is too fragmented to get the hardware/software integration right, and popular enough for mass adoption.

If they release it they could tigger a whole new era of computing. e.g. Imagine going to work without having to bring a laptop along.

Actually, on many if not most devices you can just 'cast' the entire display to a Chromecast, which is inexpensive enough that it's unlikely anyone's going to bother developing a replacement mechanism. The nearest thing to that is MHL, which is apparently encumbered by licencing issues and requires use of the USB port (which means that an OTG adapter for attaching mouse/keyboard is now out of the question).

In addition to Samsung's own smart docks, Sentio is doing something like that with their superbook. http://www.getsuperbook.com. They had a dock as well for a while.

Phones with 8gb of ram like the Oneplus 5 make this more and more appealing to try out.

That's what this Kickstarter project is trying to achieve.

https://www.sentio.com/

It looks like a MacBook Air, but is really just a screen, keyboard, touchpad, and portable battery bank for your Android phone.

Hopefully my Kickstarter pledge pays off!!

There is one: USB Type-C

I do believe you can actually get a desktop going by installing https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=x.org.server and setting the display environment variable in termux.

Wow, cool and really well working app! Now I only need to get me a great b/t keyboard that fits in a pocket :)

Termux is so bloody handy. That and one of the recent Blackberry phones and you've a tool rather than a toy

Very cool thanks for sharing!

> Not super practical in terms of battery life

Samsung avoided this problem by requiring that the phone is connected to the dock that is also charging it.

I tend to agree with your sentiment, but

> this would never

From experience, I now pause and consider twice any statement I make using never. You know, I thought Facebook would never become dominant using such a one-size-fits-all interface where I can't even choose a theme or even my color, let alone which elements to be displayed and in which order (I keep thinking their UI is ugly to this day, if this was our 'home' it feels it looks like a housing project on internet to me). Or back in 2010 when I bought an iPhone 4 and later an iPad 2, I thought Apple would never keep iOS so dumbed down compared to OSX (e.g. "Smart" features, a great first step into intuitive automation, the real graal of computers imho, lest one thinks it's OK to become a robot and click/tap thirty times to perform thirty times the same operation).

So... yeah, I don't know. Everything says you're right today, but with just the right tools/apps, a good Linux distro tailored to popular phones could reach the same level of popularity than, say, iPhones (currently ~10% of the market, roughly one in ten Android phones).

To be fair this is already what we do. Android already IS linux. You can install plenty of scripting environments like Ruby or Python while having access to the underlaying Linux system which is only partly crippled.

Personally i see this more as a marketing thing from Samsung than anything else.

Yeah, screen size sucks. Didn't Intel build some wireless screen technology a few years ago? Somehow I never saw it in action, but as far as I can imagine I would like to have a >24 inch screen which I could use as a normal Display Port monitor, but also via NFC (+ some magic wireless technology) as a wireless monitor for my smart phone.

Does anybody know where I can buy such a device or why it is not yet available?

If you're going to carry a tablet and a BT keyboard, you might as well just get a light Chromebook instead. While I can run Linux locally via crouton, I mostly just SSH into my workstation and resume my screen sessions.

Can you share what bluetooth keyboard you use? I've been looking for one to take faster notes without needing a full laptop.

Could also be 'Thank you for showing your interest in Samsung for the Galaxy project'?

Yes.

I thought the same thing!

> "I would love to download X distro directly from their website > install on the smartphone somehow > boot > install phone drivers > make calls"

Unfortunately it will never be that simple. First, the distro you want would need to have an ARM port targeting the same version of ARM SoC in the phone. ARM isn't like x86 with just two targets (32 bit and 64 bit), it's a quagmire.

Second, your distro of choice would need to stick with the exact kernel version used by the phone, and I guarantee if you take any three Android phones by three different manufacturers made in the past two years, you'll see three different kernel versions, each with tweaks made just for that device. Said tweaks would make it impossible to have a distro targeting all three devices even if they did have the exact same kernel version.

Third, your distro maintainer would need to own or have access to every Android device she wished to target, and while that works for a community driven project like Lineage OS, it's not realistic for the lone Linux distro developer or small team who wants to add phones as targets for their existing desktop class distro.

> At Samsung, we continuously ask ourselves what else is possible, and what else we can do to bring a better experience for our users.

Here's a tip: don't mess with my scrolling.

It is open source and it is being continued at https://ubports.com/

Tizen on smartwatch is pretty awesome.

Imho its miles ahead of the other watch OSes

I had a N810. Great device, but once iPhone and Android smartphones came out, the market for these quickly shrunk to niche status.

would love to do that, too - but if you use the phone responsibly and maturely then its smartphone capabilities are pretty useful.

for starters - don't throw away the phone - throw away the crapps - FB, WA, IG, Twitter, SC, ...

The whole point is not to notify you, rather to get a feeling how much people would eventually buy it.

Swearing? Don't you mean jubilating? Isn't Ubuntu on Samsung Galaxy phones exactly what he would want?

I followed the link, but don't quite understand the product. Does Ubuntu Touch OnePlusOne replace the OS on the device? So I buy one of the supported phones listed, and then erase and replace Android with this in it's place? Or it installs on top of?

Does it still maintain phone functionality (sms, calling, data)?

To get fast VMs, you need the guest OS (in this case, Windows) to be built for the same CPU architecture, and preferably to have virtualization features on the CPU. Since you're not likely to get either, you'd have to emulate the CPU. QEMU can do it, but it'll be slow.

On the other hand, if Windows 98 is enough for you, you can run it on your phone right now: http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

That site is doing the CPU emulation in JavaScript(!). It's fast enough because, well, it's Windows 98.

I think you mean RNDIS?

Ah so I am not the only one! My MacBook Pro was regularly crashing completely when I unplugged my dock while it was closed. I now always have to wake up my MacBook before I unplug the dock.

By "forefront of USB-C connectivity", you mean the new iPhones still use the proprietary lightning connector, to the detriment of progress.

Actually, you probably could. If you write the hibernate image to a place using a machine-id of some sort. Imagine you have images like

    /hibernate/machine/5c76f5e0-9117-4e33-8093-9de2e2f1b6de
    /hibernate/machine/d755fe2c-2b13-4436-8a5b-ba3363b9c642

When your kernel boots up, it grabs its machine-id and looks for a hibernation image to map into its memory. If it finds one, great, you have an "instant wake". If it doesn't, you boot as normal. Now imagine that your kernel tries to mount a specific device to `/hibernate` prior to looking for hibernate images. Upon hibernating, it writes its image to its machine-id. You could easily share the disk between two machines (even of different architectures) and keep two separate hiberante images on disk. You wouldn't be sharing the processes, but you could share your data.

With a sophisticated enough setup, you could probably even dual-install binaries (although this would be much involved with ELF where you must have separate binaries compared to something like Mach-O) to something like /usr/bin_x86_64/ and /usr/bin_arm64/ and then use your shell to select your path. This might work on a system level, but would certainly work on a per-install basis manually.

That's true, but we're getting close: Linux ostensibly supports power-toggling and hot plugging CPUs, memory, and disks at this point. I think it's more focused on allowing VMs to be resized and replacing bad components in servers, but I know that some systems are already using some of this tech to improve power management and support better hibernation. I think there's still quite a ways to go to make graphical sessions robust enough to be suspended and then brought up on different hardware (I don't think things are presently set up to allow for changes to the pci controller and X sessions expect things to be pretty static, as evidenced by the hoops you need to jump through for switchable graphics), but we may get there if a major company ever decides to take an interest.

> You can’t hibernate an OS and swap out all the hardware and expect it to actually wake back up. You’re going to have to do a full boot.

Have you actually tried? You sound like you're used to Windows where if you change a single piece of hardware the whole OS goes to pieces and needs to be re-installed or go through a painful process of driver searching. Considering I can (and have) literally moved hard drives between vastly different generation machines (granted, they were the same architecture), I don't think it's that far fetched to imagine Linux might actually resume from a hibernate with no issues on different machines. I've got some spare time this weekend, and I might just have to test this theory. Even if it doesn't work out, my experience with swapping hardware in Linux leads me to believe it wouldn't be that hard to add support for resuming from hibernate on different hardware. Sounds like a good college senior CS project to me.

CRIU

I just googled this, do you mean https://softwarebakery.com/projects/drivedroid?

Sounds rather nice, especially considering I've been installing various systems over the last few days and flashing images to a thumb drive gets old really fast.

Thanks for mentioning this, it'll probably save me a few hours in the future!

The Linux Device Tree infrastructure was created as a hardware description for hardware that cannot describe itself at runtime, which is mostly ARM SoCs. However that only works when hardware drivers are wired up to the device tree infrastrucure instead of being fully hardcoded. Given the usual bare minimum investment in software by most embedded hardware vendors, many/most drivers probably aren't.

Given a set of hardware with the same instruction set and drivers with full device tree support, one can now create one kernel for the whole set.

The closest to a "generic" smartphone is probably the Mediatek reference platform(s), indeed found in various Chinese smartphones. Except for presence/absence of certain peripherals like sensors, those tend to be almost identical in hardware and software. Source is unfortunately not officially available but occasionally leaked along with (extensive) documentation, and there's a small community of developers who work on these cheap devices. As a bonus, they also tend to have a completely unlocked-by-default bootloader.

https://www.slashdata.co/blog/2013/05/the-mediatek-phenomeno...

In a perfect world manufacturers would give out this information, but it's understandable that they wouldn't (this doesn't mean that I don't think they should, but I know why they wouldn't). The issue is with "locked" bootloaders–the manufacturer is going through extra effort to make sure you can't run another operating system on your phone. This is inexcusable since it's not just a passive lack of helpfulness, it's an intent to make sure you can't have full control of your phone.

You can actually compile the userspace (which is more or less most of what is meant by a distro) and install it on pretty much anything. I do this a lot. The kernels have to be recompiled but that's trivially easy.

> the kernel needs to be tailored to the specific phone

Out of interest, would it be possible to operate an ARM SoC system like a generic x86 system, if drivers were upstreamed? Or is there too much SoC specific code?

I don't think it's just that, the point is that under the current Android HW situation, phones are locked to kernel versions. Any necessary kernel updates after release are then manually back ported to that kernel version. So that means you won't be able to install any Linux system, you'll have to run that provided by Samsung, running their own custom kernel.

Although I agree we should be supportive.

They are only on old kernels because of proprietary kernel module blobs. Open source those and a thousand developers will line up to mainline them for device support.

If the bootloader is unlocked / fastboot can write to the bootloader / etc you can put whatever code on your phone you want to run.

The problem is the hardware is undocumented and the shipped drivers are proprietary so you would need to reverse engineer support for everything from the chipset to the modem to the display adapter.

So you can go throw a Debian Arm image in place of a system partition on many Android phones... it just won't boot.

> It's possible for you to unlock the bootloader on your phone to run a custom kernel?

No, due to proprietary firmware and drivers you're tied to a specific Linux kernel version.