The remarkable effectiveness of a lapdock

SAMSUNG: THE WEIRD YEARS

A “lapdock”. It’s a laptop shell that has no storage or memory, but does have: - 1080p Touchscreen (USB-C) - Mouse and Keyboard - Built-in Battery (10,000 mAH) - and more!

PREDECESSORS

The internal battery acts like a power bank when your phone is connected.

Mindmaps are way more fun to tinker with on bigger screens!

WHY?

Blue light from screens strains our eyesight and distorts the circadian rhythms associated with healthy REM sleep. Make e-readers a part of your beauty routine today!

The amount of electronics I was carrying around with me was getting unwieldy; I needed to simplify.

IMPRESSIONS

FINAL THOUGHTS

LaptopPhoneTabletE-Reader

only applies to some phones, e.g. Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 or Motorola Edge+

I'm using my phone less. A lot less. Using my phone as a phone feels incredibly limited after getting used to desktop mode. I am using Samsung’s DeX mode that’s available as an option on its higher end devices like the Galaxy S and Z series. Having a bigger canvas to work with feels incredibly liberating. I actually felt like I could interact with my phone like a real computer, instead of having its small screen limit me to doomscrolling or taking screenshots of internet ephemera I’ll probably never look at again. Even the bigger 8-inch screen on the foldable isn’t all that helpful unless your idea of multitasking is having Youtube sit on one half of the screen and open a shitty little notes app to scribble on the other. Android is a very capable laptop replacement. Keyboard shortcuts work!

A common feature of early lapdocks like the Atrix and Transformer was that they were exclusive to their vendor. You couldn't use a Samsung phone with an Atrix dock, and you couldn’t put anything other than an Asus phone into the Transformer dock. Today’s lapdocks by comparison are much more flexible. They are a “dumb pipe” so to speak, and work with anything that supports video out via USB-C and HDMI. Heck, the one I have has a mini-HDMI port as well. AND they come with every supported cable type included! In a world where we’re hurtling ever faster towards a walled-garden ecosystem of hardware that can only talk to each other if they’re made by the same company, that’s an increasingly important differentiator for me. Lapdocks are one of those products where you find yourself both marveling at their simplicity, yet fearing for their longevity. Because they use off-the-shelf components, new product development is slow, manufacturing margins are thin, and some models, like the 11.6” FHD one I bought are unlikely to be restocked once the inventory is depleted. The market is still so niche that the companies that build these products could abandon it at any moment. It isn’t just hardware bottlenecks though; the future of desktop environment software matters too, and unfortunately that is vendor-specific. I think Samsung Dex and Moto Ready are huge competitive differentiators, but do enough people feel similarly? Is it possible that one day they will quietly sunset these efforts and push their customers towards underpowered Chromebooks or overpriced AR glasses? Steve Jobs described the paradigm of personal computing as a ‘bicycle for the mind’ when presenting the first Mac in 1984. The relentless shift to mobile over the past 15 years has resulted in a reversal of that ethos, with handheld computers defaulting to oversimplified mobile apps designed for imprecise touchscreen taps. While lapdocks can’t reverse the power user-hostile design changes these apps have introduced, their comfortingly old-school hardware does help swing the pendulum back in your favour .

I had recently managed to eliminate the tablet by getting a foldable phone with pen support.

Samsung actually does make dedicated docks specifically for DeX-enabled devices, but they’ll leave your scratching your head as to who they’re intended for. A dock that costs $150 and does nothing besides hold your phone upright and add a few ports? To connect to a monitor that’s not included?? They seem to have a completely different customer profile in mind than the ones these lapdocks are going for: less a gritty road warrior type, and more fancypants executive that presumably has a monitor just lying around, ready to be plugged in. For a company that’s rarely nixed a product pitch, no matter how silly, it’s unfortunate that they’ve never bothered to experiment with the form factor.

The laptop was next. I dallied too long on getting the battery for my 2014 Macbook replaced for a reasonable fee and am now past the cutoff for the oldest model they’ll service. Any hopes I had of snagging a refurbished M1 Macbook ended the moment I saw the extortionate markup on RAM upgrades. How is it that the RAM allotment in the base model MBP is still unchanged from 2014 at an piddling 8GB?

replaces this

2014 MBP Battery Replacement $300 2021 M1 Mac RAM bump to 16GB excl. $1200 base model cost $400 UPERFECT X Mini 11.6" incl. shipping & customs$250

"JUST GET A LAPTOP!"

ShortcutFunction ALT + TAB Cycle between open apps FN + → FN + ← Snap application to right or left side of screen PRNT SCRN Take screenshot of DeX desktop CTRL + T Open new browser tab CTRL + SHIFT + T Reopen closed browser tab CTRL + L Focus typing cursor in address bar CTRL + 1 Shortcut to Tab #1, works with other numbers on KB

News flash: small laptops don’t exist anymore! The last one of any note was the 12” Macbook which was discontinued in 2017. Windows has interesting niches like 8” sub-notebooks, but they’re all Kickstarter/AliExpress projects of dubious reliability. In any case, why should I need to be carrying around a device that costs 4 figures and has my web server’s private SSH key on it, just to have a broader canvas for productive computing? At least if anything happens to the lapdock, I can swap it out for far less than the cost of a new computer. I feel like Ryan from The Office, wanting nonsensical devices with hyper-niche use cases in a world where everyone else has managed to get by with the default offerings.

The lapdock can contort itself into several shapes. Tent mode is useful for using as a space-saving standalone monitor. But most useful of all for me is the ability to actually use it on my lap. This remains the largest shortcoming of hybrid solutions like the Surface Pro or iPad Keyboard cover that use a lightweight keyboard and kickstand that is designed to stand upright only on even surfaces like a table.

LAPDOCK

2005 JUKE One of their earliest attempts at a music phone, potentially to compete with the Apple-Motorola collaboration, the very ‘00s titled ROKR.

Images 100% of the images I save live on my phone. They will never make their way on to a proper computer unless I need them for a specific purpose. So I may as well have a nice screen to enjoy them on. VideoVideo is a predominantly widescreen format, and as such has suffered on mobile screens for so long that we’ve simply given up and invented an entire industry around portrait-orientation video. But as misadventures like Quibi showed, quality work often necessitates a wider canvas. Portrait video, like portrait apps, feel like frivolous little toys more useful for distracting than doing, or experiencing.

You can continue running apps on your phone while DeX is active on the main monitor!

✱ Make Phones Productive Again ✱ ✱ Make Phones Productive Again ✱ ✱ Make Phones Productive Again ✱ Make Phones Productive Again ✱ Make Phones Productive Again ✱ Make Phones Productive Again ✱

WHY ISN’T THIS MORE POPULAR?

It charges your phone, connects to anything with USB-C/HDMI out, and exposes the 20:9 portrait touchscreen for the fraud it is. So why is it that the only companies that make lapdocks sound like Wish.com brands? One reason is simply volume: most phones don’t support desktop mode, and even then, phone manufacturers don’t seem to treat those phone that do have it as a feature worth marketing. Currently, desktop mode is the domain of OEMs that have created a desktop GUI layer on top of the Android OS. Google introduced a version of desktop mode with Android 12, but it’s laughably rudimentary and not at all ready for daily use. The second, more sordid reason is one of avarice. Companies like Samsung and Motorola make laptops and tablets (the latter doing so under the Lenovo brand) and don’t stand to gain anything by selling a plastic shell to hook it up to.

WHAT WORKS BETTER

MOTOROLA 2011

ASUS 2012

VendorsNotes UPERFECTMultiple sizes: 11.6", 13”, 14”, 15”. Wired/Wireless Price range: $200 - $450 NexdockUses same set of hardware components as UPERFECT, fewer variations; 13” model, wired/wireless editions Price range: $269 - $349

Notetaking I use both Logseq and Obsidian. Seeing as how they were desktop-first applications, I felt lost using the Android apps as doing things like [[tagging]] notes felt clunky on a touchscreen keyboard. With a lapdock, the apps expand to fill the wider screen, and with a keyboard in tow, the transition is seamless. Mindmapping and WhiteboardingI use SimpleMind and a self-hosted version of TLDraw. It goes without saying that anything with an infinite canvas (spreadsheets included) will deliver inferior experiences on a narrow mobile screen that can just about display 1 image at a time.

NO SYNC REQUIRED

Craig Mod has written about the cumulative impact on productivity that can be had with “fast software”, i.e. applications that load quickly and have a low-friction UI that lets you start working with minimal delay. Notepad on Windows and Preview for Mac would be examples of fast software. A lapdock, despite being a piece of hardware, turns my Android phone into fast software.

Transitioning to lapdock use felt frictionless because there was nothing required other than plugging in a cable. No app installation, no cloud service to log into, no 2-factor authentication code to wait for. Heck, I don’t even have to waste time trying to connect to a spotty wifi network before giving up and turning on the mobile hotspot.

Regular image: click here

RedditIt is incredibly satisfying to have a browser window with site:reddit.com searches and a 3rd party client on the same screen so I can just move from one search result to another without needing to switch between apps. I’m going to enjoy this for as long as 3rd party apps survive the API Pricing extinction, which should be for another month or so. General PeripheralsThe lapdock also comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD card slot. These along with replaceable batteries were standard on phones until about 2016. If you need these features, you normally have to carry around a USB-C dongle, and even then you can only use one of them at a time.

2007 BLACKJACK II An affordable Blackberry ripoff running Windows Mobile 6.1, designed for the temporarily embarrassed finance bro whose employer has yet to equip him with a Blackberry.

2007 YP-2 8GB The YP-2 was an iPod Touch-style MP3 player that came with a built-in microphone and connected to your phone via Bluetooth so you could theoretically both take calls and play music on the same device.

Wireless DisplayYou’ve no doubt noticed the unsightly cable connecting the phone to the lapdock. My 11.6” model doesn’t support wireless display, but a lot of newer models do. They works via Miracast, but performance is reported to be spotty, and there is doubt as to whether it will ever match the near-zero latency of a wired cable. Screen Aspect RatioEvery lapdock manufacturer is building models out of a common set of off-the-shelf components, screens being one of them. Most 1080p panels in the market have a 16:9 aspect ratio. In recent years, laptops have come with 16:10 and 3:2 ratios that offer more vertical real estate, but they are rare. Screens with these dimensions are unlikely to ever be available in lapdocks. General Availability of Desktop ModeThe biggest hindrance to the adoption of desktop mode in the mainstream is the fact that it’s not a core Android feature. Only a few OEMs have designed software to add a desktop GUI layer for your phone. Samsung has DeX, Motorola has Ready Desktop and Huawei has EMUI Desktop. All of these are mature enough for everyday use, but they’re only available on the higher-end models, meaning that most people won’t even know that something like this is available.

Rafi’s Repository

This egg-holder shaped trinket’s sole notable feature is its full RJ-45 ethernet port, a natural feature for the power users that regularly find themselve at top-secret facilities where every network is airgapped from the public internet

From an inconspicuous loaf of peripherals into a serviceable mobile workstation. Looks neat, but the folding BT keyboard isn’t particularly ergonomic, and it starts looking bad once you add a USB OTG dongle for the mouse.

WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED

A desktop environment for your phone!

Going with the lapdock was an obvious choice. The phone that sits in my pocket already has 12GB of RAM. Editing video is a laggy mess on my laptop with it's 9-year old SSD and processor, yet it absolutely flies on a phone while doing the same things (adding transition effects, multiple audio/video layers). And yet for 90% of the time, the way we use our phone defaults to the most passive purposes possible: watching videos, scrolling through feeds and responding to messages. All of this was possible a decade ago on hardware 1/10th as powerful.

The remarkable effectiveness of a

Who knew a battery-equipped laptop shell could make my phone so useful?

The MOTOROLA Atrix dock in 2011 was before its time; a sleek dock for your phone, connected to a laptop body that resembled the Macbook Air. At $500, it was too costly for most, but the combination of the hardware with Motorola’s “Webtop OS” led the way for how future devices would evolve

The ASUS Transformer Pad from 2012 was perhaps an even more audacious attempt at combining the two form factors. the Transformer pad physically absorbed the accompanying Transformer phone, like a sci-fi movie with a ship inside a massive space station.

WHAT?

LaptopPhoneTabletE-Reader

The amount of electronics I was carrying around with me was getting uniwieldy; I needed to simplify. I'd managed to eliminate the tablet by getting a folding phone with pen support (Galaxy Z Fold 3)

Mindmapping and WhiteboardingI use SimpleMind and a self-hosted version of TLDraw. It goes without saying that anything with an infinite canvas (spreadsheets included) will deliver inferior experiences on a narrow mobile screen that can just about display 1 image at a time. NotetakingI use both Logseq and Obsidian. Seeing as how they were desktop-first applications, I felt lost using the Android apps as doing things like [[tagging]] notes felt clunky on a touchscreen keyboard. With a lapdock, the apps expand to fill the wider screen, and with a keyboard in tow, the transition is seamless.

The e-reader isn’t going anywhere!

production possibility frontier: -

jjuanbagnelakes makes the points that the mobile phone has become the first computer for a lot of people who didn't go online until smartphones made them accessible and universal. back then, smartphones didn't have to do much beyond handle web, phone calls and email. You don't end octa-core 12GB ram with 5G broadband chip for that.

Nobody's doing Real Work (TM) on phones, no matter how many architects and teachers Apple manages to show holding an iPad. And that's because the OS owners long ago made a business decision to massively simplify apps on mobile, even as mobile screens grew larger and capable of displaying more information.The medium is the message after all.

A common feature with early lapdocks like the Atrix and Transformer was that they were exclusive to their vendor. You couldn't use a Samsung phone with an Atrix dock. The Asus Transformer was a paperweight without the accompanying phone. Today’s lapdocks by comparison are much more flexible. They are in effect a “dumb pipe” so to speak, and work with anything that supports video out via USB-C and HDMI. Heck, the one I have has a mini-HDMI port as well. AND they come with every supported cable type included! In a world where we’re hurtling ever faster towards a walled-garden ecosystem of hardware that can only talk to each other if they’re made by the same company, that’s an increasingly important differentiator for me. They’re far from too good to be true though. Because they use off-the-shelf components, new product development is slow, and some models, like the 11.6” FHD one are unlikely to be restocked once the inventory is depleted. It isn’t just hardware availaibility though; the future of the software matters too, and unfortunately that is vendor-specific. I think Samsung Dex and Moto Ready are huge competitive differentiators, but do enough people feel similarly? Is it possible that one day they will quietly sunset these efforts and push their customers towards underpowered Chromebooks or overpriced AR glasses? If so, that would be a huge blow for economical computing on the go. I don’t think I’m overreacting. Could I just have looked a little harder for a small laptop? Maybe, but why should I be carrying around a device that costs 4 figures and has my server’s private SSH key on it, just to get a bigger screen? At least if anything happens to the lapdock, I can swap it out for far less than the cost of a new one.

ryan ipod phone, similar to you're using it wrong thinking used by companies - takeaways - -- we need desktop mode - -- we need companies that experiment and release weird stuff

Shape morph, bicyle for the mind