...But Continuum feels pointless to me, I left the dock in the box. I have computers anywhere I am going to use a full computer. Or my Surface Pro. I guess maybe this sort of thing might be appealing to the "mobile only" crowd who never owns a PC again?

As it's been noted, there are a handful of other projects like this, so I don't mean to say it isn't special. But a big criticism for Continuum is that it's practically not very useful...when are you ever going to have your phone, monitor, and keyboard available but not a laptop?

What's a practical use for these things?

I like the idea of a phone being one's only smart device and have great docking support. Even better if docking interfaces were standard so things like work areas equipped with monitors, mice, and keyboards in airports would work with future iPhones, Androids, and other phones.

For my work, a good web browser, and a good SSH terminal app (that supported many terminals open at once) would cover most of my needs.

I am hoping I can do this with the librem5 and a dock.

You have the option of "docking" a portable but you will never be able to conveniently lug along something like a desktop unless you carry some display device along with it.

So I don't need additional computers in my life but if my phone had docking support I'd seamlessly just plug it into my existing setup.

As the laptop and pc depreciate over time and phone hardware improves with every generation, a DeX platform becomes more attractive as a node on my KVM setup.

It has two major downsides right now. There's no win32 support, so there's not much to run on the desktop, which MS is going to address by bringing x86 emulation to arm. Secondly, the hardware isn't quite powerful enough, which limits the max. resolution and the ability to multitask, which the new qualcomm 835 based phones with 4+ gb of ram should address.

It is impressive, but I haven't found a use for it. After all, when you have a laptop, why use it to run apps from your phone?

What are the upsides here?

Synchronised calendar, user accounts, data, everything? You can do that without sharing the hardware. (Much harder to do it without relying on the internet, admittedly.)

Less maintenance because you don't have to worry about two devices?

Cost efficiency because you don't have to pay for a standalone computer? I suppose that's the big one, and I guess it's good enough. Then again, you could just get something like a Raspberry Pi for not much money. And if you need a dock, that won't be free, either.

Don't get me wrong, I see the potential, but I'm not sure it's where the world is headed. I guess it will be one of a large number of modes in which people use computers with displays larger than tablets.

I don't know if this really solves that, though ...

I would like to maintain the same compute environment from phone to laptop but I would still need to bring the laptop (or, rather, the laptop shaped dock) with me everywhere.

This is because you can't possibly plug untrusted/unknown devices into computers you own. There is no way I am plugging my "CPU" into a hotel/airport/Regus workstation.

I've been proven wrong before, so it could certainly happen again, but I just cannot see this being a widely-desired product. How large is the set of people who want a tiny, low-powered laptop that is useless without a phone tethered to it? This is a geek fantasy, where we imagine that having a single computing device is better somehow, despite there being no meaningful scenarios that this enables.

First I would like to have a phone with x86 cpu so I could run the same software as on my desktop, without real desktop cpu it will be hard to use device like that as laptop replacement.

Secondly why would I like to carry something like that instead of normal laptop. I understand I can buy e.g. two devices one for work one for home but still why not just have a two laptops and sync stuff using cloud.

I think it's not a future, the future is folding device that could work as phone and unfolded as laptop. We are not there yet to combine everything in one device that would be useful for every use-case.

1. Mobile and not wanting to carry anything larger than my phone. Anything too big to fit in a pocket might as well be a laptop.

2. Stationary and wanting a full keyboard/mouse/monitor.

The phone itself can already handle the functions I need: RDP, VNC, SSH, Email, IM, etc... Any important data/services/tools live on one of my servers already. Give me a good docking station setup, and it will be my only device.

My PC is configured with terabytes of slow storage, gigabytes of fast storage, a fast CPU, a fast GPU, and applications that need lots of storage and a fast video card and big screens. I'm unconstrained on size and power consumption and optimized for performance and my efficiency.

Meanwhile, my phone makes all kinds of compromises in order to be small and run all day on a single charge.

If being able to dock a phone is a good idea, why not go one step further? Make a watch that's your PC. When you sit down at a keyboard and monitor at Starbucks, it pairs with your watch and you get to work. Make the phone be nothing but a remote speaker, microphone, and display for your wrist computer. Your desktop is just a remote keyboard, mouse and display.

The problem is that there is no phone with an i7, 32 GB RAM and 1TB SSD now. That's my laptop. My phone is a sub 5" Xperia X Compact. 3GB, 32 GB storage, a Snapdragon 600 something. Fast but not suited for the job I'm doing on the laptop.

Then the battery. It would drain as fast as the one of those old laptops that need to have theirs replaced.

We're still not there and I not sure there is a market for that. Maybe we'll get there by inertia once batteries and cycles per Watt will allow it. The direction we are headed now for this use case is the phone CPU driving a smart terminal to a powerful remote computer, with attached monitor and input peripheral.

An alternative to docking station: these AR screens and keyboards from the Dennou Coil scifi anime https://mengle.wordpress.com/tag/dennou-coil/ Kind of Google Glasses required.

With a phone processor it will still be ARM, you won't get a great laptop. But it already costs $250, for that price you can get an entry-level laptop that will probably perform in a similar way while still leaving your phone independent.

It doesn't have to be an either/or. You can think of it as an "expansion bus" situation. You can have a bunch of compute power on the desk, but still a relatively "dumb" terminal. It can augment the mobile device from your pocket rather than being an entirely separate device.

An example would be how the Surface Book dGPU option has an extra GPU in the detachable keyboard. Attach the keyboard and you play some games you couldn't otherwise when detached. Sometimes you just use the power the mobile device itself carries; sometimes you increase its access to CPU/GPU cores as you have access to fixed resources such as work desks or home desks or cool hotel screens or what have you.