Comment by ownagefool
2 years ago
If all you're doing is normal word processing / browser things, this basically sounds like a good enough daily driver.
Add in a fold, and some folks could probably live with a single device across all use-cases, and it'd simply be better because of not needed to sync files.
It might not be good, but not because the idea is bad.
You can do way more than that. Android can run web servers on-device; I can code and edit my PHP website on an Apache/Nginx/Lighttpd local server, and push changes to production server. All without opening Termux.
If you have Termux, you can do even more, like run a VM for a sandbox dev environment. No cloud required.
Android in desktop mode is far more useful and less locked down than Chromebook. As usual, Samsung has led the way in making yet another Android feature viable, as Google tries to catch up 7 years later.
> Android in desktop mode is far more useful and less locked down than Chromebook
My chromebook (framework) has 64gb of ram and 2tb NVME and thunderbolt 4. It also runs containers, vms, vms inside vms, windows vms, macOS vms, AND Android apps from the play store.
Only thing missing is PCI passthrough from thunderbolt enclosure
At 64GB RAM, what you have is a specialist laptop where most of the work is happening inside of a shell environment.
I tried running Android apps on a Chromebook. Even something as simple note taking (Obsidian/Logseq) didn't work properly because it could not save a text file into local storage. That was over a year ago, so I don't know if things have changed.
Windows Phone has this feature long time ago and I got to experience it at conference they had. Yea, if your daily workflow is Email/Word Processing/Basic Spreadsheets, it could mostly do what you need it to do but was touch laggy due to hardware. At this point, with most Pro devices, it could 100% be your daily driver. Seems all that is missing is software support. I wish iPhone would do it but Apple clearly doesn't want to cut into iPad/Mac sales.
>If all you're doing is normal word processing / browser things, this basically sounds like a good enough daily driver.
On 2019 era phones probably not, but on recent flagships with >8GB of RAM and latest Qualcomm SoCs, and UI desktop enhancements like Samsung's DEX, definitely. Except nobody knows about it.