New Dock Lets Windows 10 Phone Be a Desktop
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@JaredBusch said:
The XL model is fully as powerful as many low end laptops. I see a large segment of people that will use something like this as a single device instead of having more than one.
The power I'm not worried about, seems plenty powerful to be useful for many users. It's more of it being an ARM-based Windows machine. The applications that people think that they want won't be available. It will be perfectly good for email and web browsing - so the question becomes, I think, how many people will want to use this for Windows Phone apps on a big screen combined with web browsing?
I feel like that segment of the population exists but are already using their phones like this and don't often care about having a big screen to connect it to.
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@Dashrender said:
Why wouldn't this be useful? You could have one device for your computer at work, then use it as a phone on the go.. and then use it as a computer at home.
The one place where I could see this being useful is for road warriors who sleep in a different hotel every night. Even that is a stretch though because you would still need to carry around a keyboard, mouse, and the docking station. A lot less to carry around then a laptop sure... but not nearly as convenient.
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@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
Why wouldn't this be useful? You could have one device for your computer at work, then use it as a phone on the go.. and then use it as a computer at home.
The one place where I could see this being useful is for road warriors who sleep in a different hotel every night. Even that is a stretch though because you would still need to carry around a keyboard, mouse, and the docking station. A lot less to carry around then a laptop sure... but not nearly as convenient.
Right, that's how I feel. I'm a bit of a road warrior, I live out of suitcases and don't need very much computing power so, in theory, this would work for me, right? Reduce the number of machines that I need to carry around, lighten the travel load.... but does it?
Carrying a mouse, keyboard and risking everything on a single device that I generally need to carefully manage its battery or start to carry lots of battery packs for seems to go from "what a convenient idea" to "oh, that's more effort than grabbing a laptop" quite quickly. Cheaper, to be sure, but more convenient is cutting it close.
But this big issue comes in when you need the monitor. Assuming that you do need one, how do you deal with that? Travel with one? That's crazy, at least with current monitors. Laptops are portable monitors already, if you need very little power go Chromebook for $199. You can't trust that places you go as a road warrior will have working monitors for you to use, except in the rarest of cases. Hotels often have televisions that you can plug into, but not often in places convenient to use (like at a desk) and often, I've found, those televisions don't handle being plugged into very well or have odd resolution problems and everything you need is offscreen somewhere.
There is going to be "that use case" where this is awesome. But I just can't see it getting out of the niche stage for a long time.
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How, I'll step back and say where this would make me very happy, add in a wireless gamepad and I could totally see using this as a video game system in a hotel or something like that. It has the power to do this well. But I doubt that they have that ready to go on day one. But I don't doubt that someday that they will figure this out.
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I love that they are trying out new things like this, that is great. And giving people the power to play around with this stuff and see what works and what doesn't and discovering how it might be useful is needed or else all we can do is speculate.
But for me, just looking at this, even though I am a heavy traveler AND have light computational needs (I mostly am on web browsers, email, etc.) it is not a fit for me nor can I think of anyone for whom it would be a fit.
It feels like the attempt is to move all of your data onto a device, rather than onto the cloud. Maybe here in the third world it makes more sense. When you can't afford a computer but everyone needs a phone and maybe you can get second hand monitors and it is just for home, not for work.... maybe.
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I think the key mistake you guys are making if that it is for traveling.
That is not now, nor has it ever been the point of a dock. The point of a dock is to give your mobile device (originally, just your laptops) a way to feel more like a traditional desktop.
By definition then, to be more like a desktop removes the portability/travel aspect.
This is for people that do not need or cannot afford to have a computer in their house just to use when they are at home. But yet still want some type of desktop feel.
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@JaredBusch said:
I think the key mistake you guys are making if that it is for traveling.
I was following up on the road warrior suggestion, which isn't a bad one but lacks some things that make it difficult to make into an awesome scenario.
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@JaredBusch said:
This is for people that do not need or cannot afford to have a computer in their house just to use when they are at home. But yet still want some type of desktop feel.
This I agree with, my question is what size is this market segment? Might be big or might be small, I don't have good insight as to whether there is much for this or not. I know some people that "might" consider this, but very few and because of the need for the monitor and stuff I think they would fall to "not" because they only want to use devices on the couch or in bed.
Where I feel this doesn't work is when people add the idea of taking it to work to be their office desktop. I just don't see companies in any quantity letting or wanting people to do that. It would be an extension of BYOD, yes, and you could make it work. But it feels, at least at first thought, overly awkward.
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@scottalanmiller said:
This I agree with, my question is what size is this market segment? Might be big or might be small, I don't have good insight as to whether there is much for this or not. I know some people that "might" consider this, but very few and because of the need for the monitor and stuff I think they would fall to "not" because they only want to use devices on the couch or in bed.
I think this is currently a very small segment because there was not any good hardware for this. It could be done with various 3rd party components. Now it will be native and I think it (this segment of users) will grow significantly.
@scottalanmiller said:
Where I feel this doesn't work is when people add the idea of taking it to work to be their office desktop. I just don't see companies in any quantity letting or wanting people to do that. It would be an extension of BYOD, yes, and you could make it work. But it feels, at least at first thought, overly awkward.
This is most certainly where this is NOT designed to be IMO also.
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Although for a business treating this as a thin client could work. Although having an "always on your desk" thin client isn't that costly or hard and would be more reliable.
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I did work for a place in California where everyone was required to take their machines home every night because of all of the break ins and thefts, so in a case like that I could see it being way easier to carry in and out of the office than a laptop. I hated having to carry a huge laptop on the train there.
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I think you would combine this dock with the cloud, not have it replaced... It would back up / sync your data, much like Owncloud / ODfB...
Arguably, I see it being more useful for tablet-sized devices... Say My office suddenly needs to shut down. I just grab my tablet off the dock and go. Assuming that I don't have a dock or monitor at my second location, I can still grab a USB keyboard & mouse after I arrive and I'm good to go.
Worst case scenario, is I'm stuck using only the touch screen, which could be a Bad Thing (tm) if I am on a 5 inch phone.
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@dafyre said:
I think you would combine this dock with the cloud, not have it replaced... It would back up / sync your data, much like Owncloud / ODfB...
I do not see what these two things (file access and physical dock) have to do with each other.
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@dafyre said:
Worst case scenario, is I'm stuck using only the touch screen, which could be a Bad Thing (tm) if I am on a 5 inch phone.
The point of this part though is that you CAN still process work even if only on a 5" screen.
Still, I don't see this working out for business yet.
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My Response about that was more towards Scotts statement below:
@scottalanmiller said:It feels like the attempt is to move all of your data onto a device, rather than onto the cloud. Maybe here in the third world it makes more sense. When you can't afford a computer but everyone needs a phone and maybe you can get second hand monitors and it is just for home, not for work.... maybe.
I dont' see why the two have to be mutually exclusive.
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@JaredBusch said:
@dafyre said:
Worst case scenario, is I'm stuck using only the touch screen, which could be a Bad Thing (tm) if I am on a 5 inch phone.
The point of this part though is that you CAN still process work even if only on a 5" screen.
Still, I don't see this working out for business yet.
I agree... It could work out... but then again it may be a major flop. Personally, I think this will be come the norm in a few more years... Potentially even happening wirelessly a la bluetooth or something similar.
I have my Phone / mobile device in my pocket / bag, and step up to a screen and push a botton and it asks me to enter the PIN that pops up on my device (much like bluetooth now), and bam! instant dock with a mouse and keyboard (that are attached to the Screen I am connected to)...
That won't be very profilferant for another decade, maybe... but that is where I see things going.
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Certainly not for me, but for people with little "office" real estate at home, or a tight budget, or basic users (not anyone in the IT crowd), I can see the allure. And maybe I'm just too old-school to like the idea for myself. Who knows? lol
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@art_of_shred said:
Certainly not for me, but for people with little "office" real estate at home, or a tight budget, or basic users (not anyone in the IT crowd), I can see the allure. And maybe I'm just too old-school to like the idea for myself. Who knows? lol
Tight budget and basic users, I get (assuming the dock is like $50.) But real estate I don't, the phone plus the dock seem like they take as much or more room than some nice and potentially really cheap desktop options. The Google Chromebox, as an example, is like the size of the dock alone. So if you can't afford that (which is like $190) sure, but if it is purely about running out of real estate I think that there are better options that are still pretty cheap. Having to have a reasonable space for the phone, cords, plugging and unplugging makes it harder to save the space that you could otherwise save.
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Seems like having a dock that you pop the phone into would be better. Instead of the cords. Then it would be like a tiny second screen as well.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I can see someone thinking that that is valuable, but very, very few. What part of what you describe sounds awesome? I already have access to my data in those places. Unless I'm super poor and work for a company that is super poor and can't afford desktops I'm unsure where the value comes in. I don't want my business using my phone as my desktop, I don't want everything stored on my phone. The only people I see thinking this is useful are those that don't want computers at all and are looking to plug this into their TV for that rare case where they need a little more than the phone interface offers but don't care enough to own even a single computer at home.
Well this goes back to @scottalanmiller desire to have specialized devices - one device per task type of view.
