Comment by rtkwe
2 years ago
I loved the idea of the phone as the portable compute that could be expanded to act like a desktop that Motorola showed back in the mid 2010s. I forget the name of the actual phone though, it had pogo pins on the side/back and a keyboard + screen combo you could dock it to to get a laptop adjacent experience.
The Motorola Atrix. When docked into a specialized laptop it would load up a full featured, albeit slow, Linux desktop. It was wild stuff at the time (and still isn't quite fully replicated even though we have N times more powerful hardware).
That looks like the one. I get why it's not really been replicated. Making a UI function well in both touch and keyboard and mouse modes is hard, the extra space you need for touch is wasted in laptop mode and then you're asking every app maker to support another UI mode which gets into the chicken and egg problem of support. It's not every useful without apps and it's not worth supporting for app makers unless there's a broad userbase or extremely low support costs. The closest we get now is the iPad pro line going in and out of a keyboard case but that's not quite the same and the jump in capabilities is pretty small because the form factors are so close.