Okay, so I have been making videos about the future
of computers for a little over a year now.
We've looked at the iPad and Chromebooks and the Mac
and Windows, and you know what?
They're all great. But the real dream
about the future of computers wasn't originally
about any of those things.
The real future of computing dream
has always been about this thing: the phone.
So here's a question:
what's the best way to turn your phone into your computer?
Here's the truth:
this already is your main computer.
It's the one that you use most often.
But what I'm talking about is making it your only computer.
And to do that, you need it to not be a phone thing,
but a big thing with a keyboard
and a big screen, right?
And that is why Samsung created DeX.
It's the thing that lets you plug your phone into a monitor,
and suddenly, you get a desktop interface for your phone.
You may have heard that with a Note 10,
Samsung made apps for it that run on
both Windows and the Mac,
so I want to look at why DeX exists and how it connects
to that dream of making your phone your computer
because it seems like a great idea.
Then it seems like a weird idea. But the thing is,
it's definitely not an original idea.
It wasn't the first.
This was:
the Motorola Atrix.
(laughs) It totally wasn't. You know it wasn't.
This was the first: the Celio Redfly.
(laughs) I can't. I can't, no.
This wasn't the first,
but maybe you know what the first was,
what the OG was.
The never-released, canceled-at-the-last-minute,
so-far-ahead-of-its-time,
it-was-never-meant-to-live Palm Foleo.
Yeah, sorry. I've got to talk about Palm again.
But actually, all three of these things,
they're ancient history, but they totally apply
to what's happening with DeX today.
So let's go back to 2007.
The iPhone had been announced, but in May 2007,
it hadn't yet been released.
Palm was busy making the Treo,
but it was really obvious that Palm OS
or Windows Mobile weren't going to last very long,
and everybody wanted to know how Palm
was going to respond to the iPhone,
so it announced this wacky thing: the Palm Foleo.
It was the brainchild of Jeff Hawkins who founded Palm
and actually deserves a lot of credit for many
of the ideas that are inside your smartphones right now.
And what the Palm Foleo is is fundamentally
a tiny little Linux laptop.
It was a thin client, but I mean not literally thin.
Look at it. It's pretty thick,
but thin in the sense that you weren't supposed
to save anything on the Foleo itself.
Instead, it was meant to get all of its information
from the phone.
It was like a remote control for a Treo,
but it also ran some of its own stuff.
It was a little confusing.
So then the iPhone gets released in June,
and it was a big deal, and Palm had to deal with it
because the Treo wasn't good enough,
and everybody knew it.
Engadget wrote an open letter to Palm
telling it to get its act together.
And so by September,
Palm just canceled the Foleo before it was ever released.
Then in 2008, we got this thing,
which is the Celio Redfly.
It was a dummy terminal for Windows Mobile 6.5,
and I owned one because I'm a maniac,
but it was bad.
And then finally in 2011,
we got the one that you might remember.
It's the Motorola Atrix.
It worked a lot like the Palm Foleo was supposed to.
It was a dummy terminal for your phone,
but it also ran Linux, and it had a Firefox web browser.
It was successful enough for Motorola
to make two versions of it.
This is the second version right here, but that was it.
It was canceled.
Okay, welcome back.
Now, in 2019, why do we care about all this stuff?
Well, let's start with DeX.
Before the Note 10, it worked like these things.
You just had to bring your own monitor and keyboard.
But now, it works differently because it's also an app
that you can run inside Windows or on a Mac.
And just to get it out of the way,
it's not great on those apps.
It's a little bit slow.
I have a hard time transferring files,
and it's pretty buggy.
But it is convenient for small things like texting
or copying and pasting stuff into your phone
if you want it later.
But that's a totally different idea.
It's not the dream of making your phone into your computer.
It's just putting your phone inside the computer
that you already have.
Maybe that's the best that we can hope for.
You see, all of these laptop things failed.
The Foleo was straight-up canceled,
and the most successful of them was the Atrix,
and they only made two versions of it.
And as I'm looking at them,
I can't help but notice that two out of the three
of these things are just Linux laptops.
Sure, they mirror stuff from your phone,
but the truth is that if you're going to build
a screen and a keyboard to mirror stuff from your phone,
you're also going to need some chips to do some computation
to make all of the syncing work. And at that point,
you're already building a Linux laptop,
so you might as well just build a Linux laptop.
It's not that much more expensive to add in
the extra components that you need
to make a full-on laptop,
and that generally leads to a much faster
and better experience.
And you know who did that?
Google with the Chromebooks that started shipping in 2011,
the same year as the Motorola Atrix.
And also, by the way,
the iPad started taking off at around the same time.
You see, what Chromebooks and iPads have in common is this:
they know that the important thing
isn't what your computer is;
it's where your data is.
Some of it is local, yeah, but usually,
the most important data comes from
and gets saved to the cloud.
And so while, sure, we could have decided as a society
that the source of truth for our data should be our phones.
Instead, we decided that most of it should be in the cloud.
That means that the dream of turning your phone
into your only computer
is part of our collective idea of what we used to think
the future would look like.
And then we went ahead and created a different future,
the one we live in now, where our data lives in servers
on the internet instead of the computer in our pocket.
That makes me realize that while DeX and these things here
are way cooler ideas than just putting
your data in the cloud, they're nowhere near as practical.
Now, there is one other super cool futuristic way
of turning your phone into your main computer.
That would be unfolding it, and yeah...
we'll see if that works out better than any of these things.
Hey, thank you so much for watching,
and I promise I didn't make this video
just to have an excuse to talk about Palm again.
But I got to talk about Palm again, so that's great.
If you've ever had a Palm phone,
let's talk about it in the comments, because Palm.