alt Hacker NewsBut what exactly productive tasks that you need the bigger screen? Because for any productive task I can think of that requires a bigger screen I would need a keyboard and a touchpad/mouse as well.
But what exactly productive tasks that you need the bigger screen? Because for any productive task I can think of that requires a bigger screen I would need a keyboard and a touchpad/mouse as well.
I'm someone who often thinks of things to cook while grocery shopping. Oh theres such-and-such on sale, oooh they started carrying X, what the hell is that what can I use that in, that sort of thing.
When that happens I'll often want to look up recipes for that stuff right there in the store. The web has gone to trash. The mobile web is even worse. Adblockers can only help so much, its just that everyone dumbs everything down for small screens. So its very frustrating trying to process some search results and find a decent recipe for some-such and find the rest of the ingredients I need to buy. This is a low time committment task, I need to do this in a busy grocery store, and not block the part of the shelves I parked myself in front of for too long. I mean, I guess I could go home and use my desktop, but odds are I'll just forget. And no, I'm not gonna ask AI for a recipe.
On a screen that big, using Orion and locking it to "always show me desktop mode", I could more comfortably browse and look up these things than I can on my Pro Max sized phone now. The inner screen has a higher resolution than an iPad Mini.
Another example, and it was one they showed only very briefly in the video: I just want a bigger keyboard damnit. They showed an app taking up the top "half" of the inner screen, a keyboard taking up the lower half, with the phone folded at a 110ish degree angle. It's a Sidekick with a touch keyboard. So any time I have some serious typing to do (Slack message regarding something that requires a prompt response but isn't just a few words, not that hard to imagine other examples), that bigger screen is going to give me a keyboard that is much easier to type on than a Pro Max can, because the keys are going to be sized much larger and will not need to rely on the on-device typing guesstimator as much (and that thing is dumb as hell). God, being able to ssh into something and actually have some room for all of the extra keys that make working in a terminal easier, what a world!
Having a real computer for any of these tasks would of course be the ideal, but as portable as those have gotten, they still don't hold a candle to something that fits in my pocket and has a software stack that reliably lets me interact with it in a meaningful way without having to make room for a keyboard and a trackpad.