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| Will the smartphone be replaced by the computer? |
The
presentation yesterday of the Samsung S8, apart from the known drip of
specifications and images, he left a very interesting detail: the
proposal to locate the smartphone in a cradle or docking station, called
Dex, which serves both to load, and to connect to a set of screen,
keyboard and mouse and use as a desktop computer.
In
principle, nothing points to the idea of Samsung to turn your
smartphone into the soul of a desktop computer going to become a
movement that takes mass adoption body, although some say that only with
its release has already surpassed Microsoft with its continuum. But
undoubtedly, it does reflect a question: the smartphones that we use
today are no longer simply "mobile phones" but pocket computers, they
are gaining in performance and memory to the point that they are already
much more powerful than the computer that NASA manufactured to start
sending men to the moon (and it is curious to imagine all those
scientists doing their countdown and connected all of them ... to the
smartphone that we carry today in the Pocket:-) and for the usual use
that a lot of users give to your computer, such as using a browser or
manage some programs of office automation, have more than enough
benefits, even possibly loose.
Motorola
Atrix LapdockLa proposal is not at all novel: some years ago, in 2011,
Motorola put on the market the Atrix, a high-end smartphone that added
the possibility of hooking it to a case or lapdock and use it as a
complete laptop, with its screen, keyboard and trackpad, which an
acquaintance of mine came to use without too many incidents during
practically two courses of his engineering career. Now, after the
"natural death" of that smartphone, the lapdock in question stores
abandoned dust in a drawer of my house (the real geeks never throw our
gadgets) waiting for one day to lift me with you want to solder and put
me to connect to one of my Raspberry Pi that again give life to what is
now a sad and inanimate body without a brain.
Apple
patent application itself Apple recently applied for the registration
of a very similar patent: a thin "brainless" casing in which a
smartphone would be inserted to function as a laptop. The idea is,
indeed, very similar to the previous ones, and clearly evokes the
company's usual strategy: to take a concept that has been invented for
several years but has not received special attention, and reinvent it to
endow it with popularity.
In
a sense, the trend is also framed in already known and proven movements
like the Microsoft Surface or the ipad Pro Apple, which try to build a
laptop from a device such as the tablet.
The
possibility of using the smartphone as a practically unique device,
able to serve as a computer in the pocket for tasks that we carry out
when we are in motion but which is inserted in a docking station of some
type to use as a complete computer could be surely very attractive, if
you do not becomes a loss of benefits or a significant discomfort,
within the world of corporate computing , which could be simplified and
cheaper in a sensible way and, in addition, fit within the modern
tendencies of untying the worker with a specific physical space in which
is his computer, in which he glues his post-it and where he puts the
photos of his children.
Does
it make sense to replace the computer with a device like the
smartphone? Are we, with the progressive increase of the performance of
the smartphone, to an idea of convergence whose time is coming?
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