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SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days agoYou could even run the desktop edition of Windows 10. And that was in 2015!
If I recall correctly that was called “Continuum” and was a big goal for MS at the time. It’s why they kept the Windows 8 tiling style for the phone and kept the option to use the tiling style in Windows 10 early on because they wanted every version on every device to functionally work the same. That way, whether you were using a tablet, a phone, a laptop, a desktop, or some other as-of-yet-not-defined form factor, you’d have a “continuum” of experience that was unchanging. The goal was to have a phone you could plug into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and use just like a PC.
I never had a Windows Phone, but I messed around with a friends, and I have to say, I never understood why they dropped their plans, it was ahead of it’s time and would have been a literal game-changer in the PC-use-space. I actually had really high hopes for the whole program at the time and was quite disappointed that they bailed on their plans and stopped developing the Windows Phone entirely, and by extension, their plans for Continuum. To this day that’s still my dream phone, one that’s essentially also a desktop computer in disguise.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Samsung toyed with this idea with DexDock and there is support directly on some modern phones with most USB-C docks.
I just tried this out on my Pixel 8 Pro…“Enable Desktop experience features” in Developer Options, reboot, plugged in Dell dock…got an android “desktop” on two monitors. They were mirrors of each other, but they were separate from the display of the phone, and they were in the monitors native res. Keyboard and mouse worked. Ethernet off the dock worked, too. It didn’t use the USB webcam I had plugged into the dock.
The UI could use some polish. Android doesn’t really have great mouse support or really any keyboard shortcuts, and the apps themselves are built for a handheld, touchscreen experience.
For example…Firefox for android…pages would default to mobile view, text scaling would be way high (can’t pinch-zoom to make it smaller) and well-known shortcuts like Ctrl+MouseWheel, Ctrl+L, Ctrl±, etc wouldn’t work.
It could be great.
I would personally love for my “desktop experience” to be a low-power, silent, cool-running system (especially nowadays, with Moonlight and Steam streaming and various “cloud gaming” services getting to be pretty damn decent if your network can handle it…and being docked means not needing wifi).
I would love to have my laptop experience be nothing more than a dock with integrated keyboard/touchpad/screen.
I would love for these to be the same system.
But it’s not there yet.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Oh yeah, it’s unfortunate how far behind Android is on this when Microsoft basically had it ready to go nearly 10 years ago and then dropped it because they were losing money on their phone department and not capturing any market share.
I honestly think Android isn’t cut out for it to begin with, because it was always a mobile-first OS.
They had a pretty okay thing going with ChromeOS and now they’re killing it in favor of moving Android to their PC line… which I personally think is the wrong move, but hey, I’m not that smart so what the fuck do I know.
theverge.com/…/qualcomm-ceo-seen-googles-android-…