Why buy a computer when you have a smartphone?

Yesterday’s launch of the Samsung S8, leaving aside the usual minor improvements in specs and camera, was interesting in one particular detail: the Dex cradle or docking station that not only charges the phone but also connects it to a screen, keyboard and mouse, turning it a desktop computer.

There’s no reason right now that Samsung’s idea of turning a smartphone into the soul of a desktop computer will be taken up en masse, even though some analysts say it has already beaten Microsoft’s Continuum. But it does reflect how smartphones long since ceased being mobile phones and instead have become pocket computers, with more performance and memory than the Orion computer that NASA used to launch men to the moon (the image comes to mind of all those scientists counting down all hooked up to the smartphone you carry now in your pocket :-) What’s more, given what most of us do on our computers: browsing, watching movies or using simple software, a smartphone is now more than sufficient to meet most of our needs.

The idea is not entirely new: in 2011, Motorola launched the Atrix, a high-end smartphone that could be hooked up to a housing or lapdock and then used as a laptop with screen keyboard and trackpad, which an acquaintance of mine used without too many hitches for two years of his engineering degree. Following the death of the Atrix, mine currently languishes in a drawer waiting for me one day to summon the Frankensteinian desire to solder it to a Raspberry Pi that will return to life its brainless, inanimate body.

Apple recently applied to register a very similar patent: a thin housing “without brain” into which a smartphone could be inserted that would function as a laptop. The idea is far from original, reflecting the company’s traditional strategy of taking a concept invented several years ago and reinventing it.

And of course, the idea has also been explored in Microsoft’s Surface or Apple’s iPad Pro, which allow you to build a laptop from a tablet, which nowadays happens to be, from a specifications perspective, not much than an oversized smartphone.

The possibility of needing no more than a smartphone, capable of being used as a computer via a docking station would mean the loss of huge profits for computer companies, but is certainly appealing to the public, and fits into the trend of freeing us from having to work in a specific physical space where sits our computer, which has become little more than a place to stick post-its and tape photos of our children.

Has the time come to replace the computer with the smartphone? Are we, with the progressive increase of features and functions on them, now looking at an idea whose time has come?

(En espa?ol, aquí)