Idea

An environment that converts your smartphone into your personal computer

Image credit: Photo by Lisa Fotios from Pexels

Shubhankar Kulkarni Oct 26, 2020

smartphone computer

General comments

Davi Lima de Mesquita3 months ago

Hi Shubhankar Kulkarni,

Thanks for sharing and elaborating this ideia. I really appreciate it, and I really imagine this scenario in the future and I think that we already have all the technology we need for these changes.

However, I see things slightly different. In my opinion, cloud computing will be much more present in these setups.

In my conception, the stations must have four features:
- Connected to power grid
- Connected to internet (which can be provided by a simple wi-fi router)
- Large display (like monitor or TV)
- Peripherals: Keyboard, Mouse and maybe a sound device

The smartphone would be responsible for light processing tasks and small files storage. The cloud computing services would be responsible for heavy processing and large files. You mentioned that smartphones "does not have the working capacity to run complex programs", that's true, but they do can connect with virtual machines from cloud platforms (like Azure, AWS etc...)

As you can see, we have everything we need to build a working station, but there are few adaptations we need to do in smartphones (maybe some company or people already did it, so please let me know):

1. Capacity to connect with displays (through HDMI, or another way) and with other peripherals. I know it's possible to do this (I already connected my phone to a bluetooth keybord and to the TV), but this procedure could be simplified and be broader (connect with a greater variety of devices)

2. The smartphones operational systems are bounded to the smartphone devices and the touchscreen feature. We need an amphibian OS: An OS that can work both in a smarthphone context and in desktop context.

3. It's also necessary to adapt smartphone softwares in order to simplify the access to virtual machine and other cloud computing services.

It's very likely that there are already solutions for these adaptations or ongoing projects. I'm looking forward to see if anyone will address these items. 

I think this proposed enviroment will be very important in developing countries. I live in Brazil, and here a lot of people has smartphones, but many people don't have access to a laptop or desktop.

Count on me to turn this idea in reality!😉 

Darko Savic3 months ago

Davi Lima de Mesquita3 months ago

Darko Savic3 months ago