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I'm starting to see these all-in-one type devices pop up where all you do is buy a phone then by accessories for it, such as a tablet or a laptop or even just a monitor and keyboard, and plug them into the phone. The other devices pretty much just act as a larger screen or give you a keyboard or mouse options while all the processing, storage, ect is done on the phone itself. This seems to be the near-future of computing, at least for basic computer uses. No need to carry around a heavy laptop and worry about transferring everything from your laptop to your desktop or phone and vise-versa, when its all stored on the phone.
I have seen two such devices so far:
The
Asus PadFone, which is just a phone that has a tablet attachment. The phone itself isn't too impressive hardware wise, but the idea itself is pretty good.
The
NexPhone. It is still only in the design stages now, and I just came across
this indigogo page for it where they are trying to raise funds ($22,692 out of $950,000

) to develop it. They have estimated prices listed on the page (the laptop dock is estimated to be $200, for example) plus a lot more information on it.
I, personally, am really interested in this. Now, I'm not going to go and sell my desktop, but I would love to have a powerful phone that I can just plug into a laptop when I want and mess around on there, or hook up to a tablet and have a larger screen without having to spend $1,200+ on a laptop or $600 on a tablet and then have to setup a local cloud storage type option so I can share everything around. I know that the accessories won't be cheap, but I'd rather buy a $200-300 phone and get a ~$200 laptop-dock add-on for it than spend another $1200 for a laptop. I'd still obviously use my desktop for larger tasks, pretty much anything thats not web surfing, watching movies/tv or listening to music and would probably even set that up to share with the phone. I could use a new phone and a decent laptop, but I may just hold off and get something like this when I can.
With phones becoming as powerful and energy efficient as they are, this will easily start to become the norm within the next 5-10 years.
What are everyone's thoughts on this? Will this be something you would want to see happen and even use? Or do you think its a stupid idea and you just want to stick to hauling a laptop, tablet and phone around and trying to share data between them all easily and cheaply?