When a Smartphone Becomes Your PC

Some of the most interesting things I see at CES are not on the show floor. They come from meetings I have behind closed doors in various suites and small rooms tied to a company’s bigger booth. One such meeting took place at Silicon Image’s suite in the Sands where they showed me a product code named Spider.

Silicon Image is famous for being behind and providing silicon solutions for the HDMI standard. They are also known for Mobile High Definition Link (MHL) and they have become a very important company in the tech supply chain. As you know, HDMI is a major standard used in all digital televisions and they deliver key solutions for MHL. MHL is an easy to use technology that’s revolutionizing how people experience mobile content. With an ecosystem of more than 750 million products, MHL is the de facto standard to connect popular mobile devices to TVs, monitors, audio receivers, and more. The current MHL 3.0 standard supports 4K Ultra HD video and enhanced 7.1 surround sound audio. Millions of smartphones are MHL compliant and are used to connect smartphones directly to MHL compliant TV’s all over the world.

The Spider product is unique in that it marries a smartphone to a laptop shell and turns this shell into a functioning computer. If you’ve ever seen the Motorola Atrix + Lapdock you may have an idea what this is all about.

275061-motorola-atrix-2-at-t-lapdock

The problem with the original Motorola Atrix with the Lapdock is, in 2011 when it was introduced, smart phones were very underpowered and trying to use it to power a laptop just did not work. However, with today’s smart phones sporting processors running one to two billion transistors, they have more than enough power to work in this configuration.

Although this product may never catch on in Western markets, Spider will be used by some major players in India and parts of Asia where even low end smart phones have enough power to work with a laptop shell. I understand that in India, a low cost smart phone will go for about $129-$159 USD and the laptop shell will be no more than $50, including a screen and an extra battery in the shell itself.

It will use MHL for the connectivity from the smart phone to the laptop shell and, in essence, give these folks a laptop to use as part of their personal computing experience.

We in the West have a hard time wrapping our minds around the fact many people in these regions actually run full businesses off their smart phones. With a Spider-like configuration, they could use the laptop shell to give them more productivity power and make running these business more efficient.

As you can imagine these folks can barely afford a smart phone so buying a laptop is out of the question for most. This gives them the best of both worlds at a price many in these countries can afford.

I don’t see this concept being big in the West, but for India, parts of South East Asia and Africa, it could be a godsend for many who want more in the way of a better computing experience.

Published by

Tim Bajarin

Tim Bajarin is the President of Creative Strategies, Inc. He is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts and futurists covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Mr. Bajarin has been with Creative Strategies since 1981 and has served as a consultant to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry including IBM, Apple, Xerox, Compaq, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Polaroid, Lotus, Epson, Toshiba and numerous others.

13 thoughts on “When a Smartphone Becomes Your PC”

    1. Back then the market was much too immature. We have been interested in this modular computing concept for some time. IT is not a new idea and was even floated and demoed a long time ago as a concept.

      What I’ve always thought was that the central CPU of a smartphone will eventually become powerful enough to power many other screens. Imagine a world where you just set your phone down on your desk and with no wires it can power a large PC monitor, keyboard, mouse, and run a full desktop OS? It sounds compelling and may very well be the future.

      But for now where this is getting more interesting is with emerging markets. There is no growth in PC form factors as a standalone piece of hardware. Plus these markets do not want to learn how to use Windows but they certainly show interest in doing more compute. It is these markets where if this is successful at all it be viable and that market has reached a maturity point where it makes sense.

      Still more work to be done in this area but its one we have been watching closely and starting to hear more rumblings about down at the market level.

      1. I can understand the appeal of sharing resources (storage, memory or processors) as a way of avoiding costly duplication. Being frugal with resources is certainly a principle of good design. However, the difficulty is usually in the added engineering complexity that results from the sharing. Simple designs that waste and duplicate resources are often the most time/cost effective given the reality of Moore’s Law.
        It would be great if I could plug my phone into a screen and keyboard, but obviously I would not want a 24″ version of my iOS apps. Instead, I would want OSX software instead. Before you know it, you end up designing a dual OS phone that is a floor wax and dessert at the same time.

        1. I don’t know why people are so hung up on touch and keyboard+mouse being irreconcilable. My best guess is.. Apple propaganda, and some of us will have a good laugh when Apple do another “designed for your hands”-like U-turn.
          Both Windows/Metro and Android support both touch and kb+ms. Both work well in both situations (Metro’s lack of apps not withstanding, it’s really not the issue here), which I guess iOS wouldn’t given its UI paradigm. I’ve used a Metro desktop and an Android desktop; the most glaring limitations compared to a full desktop OS are multiwindowing (only split-screen or one floating window are typically available, though that’s not set in stone), and keyboard shortcuts (apps don’t consistently implement them).

          1. My point is different.
            If you compare any app to its desktop equivalent (say QuickBooks for iPhone vs. desktop), you will find that the authors have had to make many fundamental changes in the user interface. On the desktop version they will show details that you’d hide in the mobile version. Similarly, certain functionality (say printing) that is crucial in a desktop version can barely be found in the mobile version.
            A mobile phone is a bit like a digital Swiss Army knife, great for when you are on the go. However, developing accessories that allow you to use a Swiss Army knife in the kitchen for preparing the family meal, just does not seem to be very promising. It is much cheaper and better to have a proper kitchen knife, even in a developing country.
            Certainly in technology, duplication is often much cheaper than complexity.

          2. I find that very question fascinating. I’m not sure the differences are that inbuilt:
            – the UI differences are, I think, as much due to the reboot of UI design thinking as a result of the democratization or IT resulting in part (but not only) from Touch and Mobile as to the limitations of the devices. Mobile got software in the hands of people even more clueless about tech than before. The new, simpler, more task-oriented UIs targeted at non-tech users are valid on the Desktop too. I don’t think it’s the devices per se that are limiting the apps, they’re designed to be simpler hence less deep.
            – especially since modern apps support various layouts. Once you get devs into the mindset of separating layout and function, going from 2-3 layouts (small phone, large phone and tablet) to 3-4 (adding desktop) is not a huge endeavour.
            – some Mobile apps with origins on the Desktop are still designed as appendages of their full-featured Desktop sibling, say to feed it data for later processing in your tax example. That’s changing extremely fast though, and even more mobile apps are fully standalone (video editing, genealogy…), whether because they’re mobile-native or just mobile-targeted. I’m now finding myself in the situation of having stuff on my phone that my PC doesn’t know how to handle, or doesn’t handle nearly as easily/pleasantly. These days, I’m even running Android in a VM on my PC, because it’s just more convenient for some stuff, especially because a surprising number of apps are superior to what I can get for free in Windows, or even not for free.

      2. “Imagine a world where you just set your phone down on your desk and with no wires it can power a large PC monitor, keyboard, mouse, and run a full desktop OS?”

        Very interesting scenario. I imagine that this would also be feasible with a tablet as well.

  1. I think it depends on whether the Spider really is less than $50. That would be almost as cheap as the cheaper iPad keyboards.

    At that price point, I think it could also be a hit in developed countries as well.

    Searching on the web, in 2011, the Atrix Lapdock apparently was sold for $500, more than the Netbooks or iPads of that time. I would argue that the hefty price was what killed it; not the concept itself. If it could truly be $50, I think it would be a nice impulse buy at the very least.

    Ever since the thin-client argument, I have been rather skeptical of products that sacrifice key hardware and are hence supposed to be cheaper. It often turns out that even without the hard-drive (in the case of thin-clients), they weren’t really that cheap. This observation is also the basis of my skepticism towards Chromebooks, and we have already seen Windows notebooks approaching or sometimes exceeding Chromebooks in low-cost.

    What I’m saying is that, if the Spider is $50, I imagine it will sell well in developed countries as well. I however have strong doubts as to whether it will actually hit that price target. My suspicion is that it will actually be $150 – $200, at which point it competes with low-cost Chromebooks and Windows with Bing laptops.

    I would like to know how confident you are of the <$50 price tag.

  2. I thought the Motorola Atrix was an excellent idea at the time but, as you pointed out, it never caught on. I agree that this Spider should be big as you suggest. Perhaps, when the iPhone is up to the A9 level the same concept will replace laptops in the US.

  3. Samsung also have had desktop docks for a while, with HDMI, USB x3, sound, charge for their S and Note lines.

  4. I’ve seen the concept of a phone that does double duty as the brains of a laptop/desktop put forward before here and elsewhere, and I continue to just not see it as a viable concept outside of a very tiny niche market. Basically the idea seems to be catnip to two tiny groups of people — nerds who crave the spiritual purity of only owning one computer, and people like Tim who travel constantly and who crave to reduce the weight of their carryon as much as possible.

    And my response, in a nutshell, continues to be that I don’t see the appeal. The added cost of putting a CPU, RAM, and storage in every screen is so trivial compared to the benefits of increased flexibility, redundancy, and the power to segregate some things so the devices that are liable to be lost don’t contain any “if you lose this data your job is toast” sensitive info.

    For constant travelers like Tim, I *really* don’t see the point — you’re going to need a keyboard and 12″-ish screen in your bag regardless because you can never 100% count on the place where you need to get work done having compatible and *functional* screens/keyboards available. So why not just throw a macbook air in your bag and be done
    with it (especially once Apple revises the air to be thinner and lighter). As for having all your work magically show up on whatever device you happen to be working on, between Dropbox and Icloud drive, that’s become a solved problem.

    To unpack that nutshell, there are the various downsides of the “one device that does everything” strategy. First, one device means a single point of failure. You lose/break the device, you lose access to *all* your data and *all* ability to access the internet until you replace it. So at a minimum, you’ll want two devices, so if one is lost, stolen, or broken, you will still be able to function as a connected human being until you manage to get it replaced. And once you’ve committed to having two computers, a phone and a laptop (with its 10x greater TDP) is more flexible and versatile than two do-it-all phones.

    Second downside, many employers would regard a do-it-all phone as a major security risk — first just because they are allergic to having work mixed with personal data, and second because phones (being small and constantly handled) are *much* more liable to be lost/stolen than laptops. If you leave your phone behind at the pub one evening, it’s locked and you’ll swing by and pick it up the next day, no big deal. If you leave your “do it all” device behind with all of your confidential and sensitive work documents on it, then that’s a huge deal. Phones can be disassembled and their SSDs cloned, and then fingerprints and PIN codes can be lifted/guessed, and then your sensitive data is up on the Pirate Bay or being sold to a corporate rival. Safest to remote wipe it the instant you discover it’s been mislaid, even if you know *exactly* where it is — and then (because it’s your only device) you lose time restoring your data onto it or to a new phone before you can get back to work.

    And I haven’t even mentioned my standard rant about how having a phone as your only CPU limits you to 1-3 watts of compute, which may be enough for Office or Pages/Numbers/Keynote, but is not enough for a vast array of other kinds of work related software (3d rendering, video editing, photoshop, etc) that slurp up all the compute you can feed them.

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