Could Your Smartphone Be Your Next PC?

During a 1992 trip to London, I started to envision what I would want in a portable computer, if the technology were capable. While I could have conceptualized a lighter, thinner, and sleeker laptop, my actual vision was much more far-reaching. As I sat on that flight, I began wondering: what if the back of the seat in front me of had a screen on it and the tray table could flip over to expose a keyboard for input? I then imagined what I called a "CPU brick," a device that I could plug into the keyboard to power this PC shell, and more importantly, provide access to all of my personal UIs, content, and email clients. In other words, the brick would be my personal computer and I would just plug it into some kind of dock connected to screens on planes and trains and in hotel rooms and airport lounges.

While the idea of having screens and keyboard docks available everywhere no longer makes sense (if it ever did), there is an emerging concept that essentially turns your smartphone into that CPU brick and makes various screens available for viewing content from the brick. Motorola attempted something like this with its Atrix and the dock accessory. Along the same lines was the Asus PadFone. The basic idea here is that the smartphone itself is a PC, which then docks into the back of either a portable screen or some type of laptop shell.

At the time these products were released, smartphones were not powerful enough to deliver a serious PC experience, but since then, two key technologies have emerged that could make this vision a reality relatively soon.

The first key technology is based on the new mobile quad-core CPUs in almost all new smartphones coming from Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Intel. Although they are low-voltage processors, most of them have processors that clock in at 1.5GHz and up to 1.8GHz, which give them PC-class computing power. Sure, they are not as powerful as CPUs with much higher processing speeds, but they all have graphics cores built in and do a pretty good job of delivering PC functionality on a smartphone.

The second technology is called Mobile High-Definition Link, or MHL, which is a mobile audio/video interface standard for connecting portable electronics devices to high-definition displays. This is an important technology that is supported by dozens of industry companies and is already deployed in more than 100 million smartphones. Silicon Image is the major company backing MHL chips that go into televisions, home theater systems, and all types of mobile devices.

In fact, at least two of these types of products are already in the works. Last fall, Korean Telecom announced its Spider Laptop shell that can connect to an Android smartphone. It uses an MHL cable for the connections that currently drives the laptop shell. At the moment, it uses its own Android phone for the connection, but it has plans to support other Android phones over time.

Samsung is also working on something like this, using the Spider Laptop reference design and tying it to its Galaxy S III smartphone. Both versions use an MHL cable from the smartphone to the Spider Laptop to power it but they could just as easily create some kind of MHL dock or even build a dock into the Spider Laptop.

MHL is a powerful connection medium that could help deliver a true laptop experience via a smartphone or tablet. Together with quadcore chips, it could have major ramifications for the industry as a whole. Keep in mind that the smartphone has all of your personal data, personal UI, and personal apps; all you would need is to have this laptop shell, or a desktop monitor connected to an MHL docking stand to mirror all that is on the smartphone. While stand-alone laptops powered by their own CPUs and GPUs won't go away, a new computing paradigm could emerge in which the smartphone actually becomes the center of our personal computing universe.

Instead of building a pricey laptop, various vendors could create laptop shells like the Spider that have some basic technology and power supply that can receive what the smartphone sends to it. Perhaps they could have some internal storage or just a SD Card slot to boost what can be stored on the laptop shell itself for future use. Depending on costs of screens, these laptop shells could be priced as low as $129, although most likely in the $179 to $199 range in the near future. Even more interestingly, since the shell does not have to sport a lot of technology inside, it could be relatively thin and light, although in some models it would be nice to have an extra battery in the shell to extend its usage hours.

In some ways, my 1992 vision of a CPU brick is coming true, though not quite as I had conceived it. Rather, the brick itself will perhaps be a smartphone and laptop shells, TVs, and other screens will be the mediums for displaying digital content and apps. Keyboards, mice, voice, and gestures will allow users to interact with these screens. If this happens, then the smartphone really does become a PC and, in many ways, will change the way we most likely think about PCs in the future.

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