The high end flagship smartphones that have been coming out over the past few months come with enough processing power inside that many folks who just do basic web surfing and shooting out emails can get by on them as their primary computing device. The problem however when trying to do that is the small screen and touch only input method. Even if your smarpthone does come with a QWERTY keyboard, we’re not sure you’d want to bang out a 500 word email on it. One user, XDA Developers forum member “Lokifish Marz”, figured out how to connect his Sprint EVO 4G to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and the results speak for themselves. Check out the video below to see what a setup like his is capable of. Note that he’s not using the default Android installation that came with the EVO 4G, instead it’s the recently released CyanogenMod 7, plus a few other bits of software.
With ARM saying just yesterday that their Cortex A15 processor will be in products that are shipping in late 2012, and Microsoft announcing that their next version of Windows will run on both the traditional x86 architecture that many of you recognize as “Intel Inside”, as well as ARM based solutions, the day of owning just one piece of hardware that acts as your gateway to the digital world is coming sooner than you think. There’s no doubt in our minds that a setup similar to what you see in the video above will be commonplace by the end of this decade. Watching YouTube videos, emailing photos, playing around on Facebook, there’s no need to have an oversized tower sitting under your desk or a laptop that burns your inner thighs to achieve those tasks.
What do you think, will the future of PCs and phones merge, or are they two different beasts?