As a consumer I'm excited by the vision these convergent solutions sell, in a futuristic "I just carry one device" way, but I think the reason they haven't kicked off is that in reality you don't just have monitors and keyboards and mice lying around wherever you go.
A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you might as well also carry the incredibly thin screen it's attached to on a laptop.
My friend has a foldable screen phone and carries a cute foldable keyboard with touchpad. He can plug in when available or just do light stuff at cafes with the keyboard in his bag
He could instead use a normal phone, but while plugging in display ("AR") glasses from Xreal, which act like an external monitor. He might also want a foldable mouse in addition to his foldable keyboard.
And the phone should be a Samsung, which has DeX (an Android desktop mode). The official Android desktop mode isn't released yet.
I've been diving towards this outcome for awhile now.
I have a gpd pocket 4 for my machine, but carry a chiri CE 5x3 and the MS arc mouse (and am looking for a second screen).
It's an extremely small footprint in my bag, and i'm not sure it can get much smaller. You could remove the keyboard and the mouse from the Pocket 4, but given they're on top of the hardware it wouldn't save that much space.
I can, in theory, do the same setup with my phone instead of the pocket though. I'm yet to really hook it all up and test (I expect several points of failure given past experiments), but the idea really is intriguing.
It does however require people to get more comfortable with smaller keyboards/mice (please for the love of god, if nothing else, swap left control with caps lock), or at least more portable ones.
And as for the ideal of "carry a drive, hook up to hardware as needed", that'll always run into the common issue of who is maintaining the hardware. We need cheap and easy to fix/replace hardware for that to ever really be a thing.
Yes -- we have both native APIs (iOS and soon Android), and a web based API (JavaScript). Our JavaScript SDK is designed for you to easily extend an existing web-based application to enable in-person payments.
We’ll be expanding support for businesses in other countries throughout 2019. If you submit an interest form for the beta on stripe.com/terminal, we’ll be sure to let you know when we’re in the UK.
I'm surprised with how many comments here are focusing on Zuck and not the market play for Facebook.
I've worked at large companies that claim to be innovative. More often than not, short-term demands made by Wall Street guide business decisions in increasingly poor ways (reducing employee benefits, stymieing R&D, etc.)
This announcement obviously helps Zuckerberg personally, but it does also provide a signal to the market for Facebook's direction.
>More often than not, short-term demands made by Wall Street guide business decisions in increasingly poor ways
Do you have any evidence that this occurs "more often than not"? I look around America, and the world, and see a ton of successful public companies. Hundreds. Thousands even. Some of them have been around for over a century.
What you're saying is exactly the type of thing someone would say as they try to wrest control from other owners; that everything will fall apart if they're not in charge. Silicon Valley likes to paint this picture of the "genius founder", but it's rarely the case in reality. If Zuck was abducted by aliens tomorrow, Facebook would live on.
I work in consulting; I have seen my fair share of badly-drawn graphics and spend more time using PowerPoint than I would care to admit.
The reality is that for most of Corporate America banning PowerPoint is not going to happen anytime soon. In our industry, decks are viewed not just as presentations but general fodder for deliverables, handouts, etc. I've been on several engagements where we intentionally jam-packed slides full of content (including multiple levels of footnotes) so they "stood on their own" in case someone picked up or distributed the deck after the meeting in which it was used.
If I was giving a talk I'd agree that presentation style would be overkill, but I've been in meetings with C-level execs and VPs where the extra info has paid off by being able to preempt questions and provide additional justification for the conclusion. Sometimes having a crowded slide is more "professional" in a meeting context than alt-tabbing to the detailed Excel worksheet showing the assumptions.
Yeah, keynote/"compelling conference content" presentations are very different animals. Even if some would prefer my presentations of the former type stood on their own better, my focus there is on the live experience. If you're presenting the findings of a consulting project? Not so much. In that case, the charts and graphics should be professional and clean but also focus on data/recommendations/etc. Very different animals.
The question is: Why use Powerpoint to present the findings of a consulting project? Handout-only would probably be superior. Amazon does it like this.
A significant part of the value prop of the "mobile" desktop is that you can "just plug in", but if you have to carry a keyboard and mouse well you might as well also carry the incredibly thin screen it's attached to on a laptop.