That means a smartphone that allows me to not carry a laptop, whenever the smartphone is adequate. A portable external display is lighter and easier to carry than a laptop, especially when compared with a laptop of the same screen size. A 17" portable display would add negligible weight to your backpack, but the same cannot be said about a 17" laptop. I also prefer to carry a compact ergonomic keyboard, instead of using the awkward laptop keyboards.

The only disadvantage of this smartphone is that it uses an old Qualcomm SoC, which predates the modern Armv9-A CPUs, i.e. it contains four 6-year old Cortex-A78 cores (and 4 little cores of negligible importance for performance).

Nevertheless, even a quadruple Cortex-A78 is faster than the fastest light notebooks of 10 years ago (which used Intel Skylake/Kaby Lake CPUs of the U series). Those notebooks were good enough for professional work then, and they remain acceptable even today, so such a smartphone should be also adequate for things like reading and editing documents or program sources, browsing the Internet or compiling software projects of moderate size (or incremental compiling of big software projects).

The same Qualcomm SoC used in this phone is also the best chip that is available today for small single-board computers, e.g. of the Raspberry Pi credit card size, and there a few companies that offer such SBCs (which have much higher performance than any Raspberry Pi; examples are Radxa Dragon Q6A and the Particle Tachyon 5G SBC). This means that Linux support for it is good and improving.

I'm curios if anyone has support experience with nex. I emailed them about the nexdock xl availability outside the US (more than 6 months ago) and still haven't heard back, and went with a uperfect (replica? same "builder"? Who knows)

Now this I don't understand.

Microsoft literally made a Windows Phone, and made so many people angry with Windows 8.

Did they literally anger people and then throw all that work away? If it's just squares on the screen, surely having an alternative Explorer mode that presents like 8 or Phone makes sense.

That seems insane to burn all that good will and then not keep any of that dev work in the background for future iterations.

Either option sounds really bad and not worth it to jump ship for me.

So a toy, but it shouldn't _feel_ like a toy. So Google (Android 16) controls your toy, but you can "run" an "OS" in it.