Ask HN: Where are dockable phones and text-only glasses?

[alexandermorgan]

There are several new or new-feeling devices that have come out or will come out in the past year, but two obvious ones are nowhere to be found.

1. Why doesn't the phone/dockable computer exist? 2. Why is there so much emphasis on vr/ar headsets when simple text overlay would be much simpler and more useful?

I have some ideas on this but I really would like to hear other people's thoughts. About the phone/computer, I actually saw a phone (or maybe it was a tablet) that could dual boot into Android or Linux maybe 5 years ago. It would be great to be able to just plug your phone into a dock with a monitor/keyboard/mouse and never have to carry around a laptop. For 90%+ people, that would be powerful enough. The iphone 16 that just came out appears to be slightly more powerful than the m1 macs, which are only 4 years old and still decently powerful machines. Now I get that Apple would never do this because it would cut into their own sales, but why wouldn't Samsung or other similar companies?

About #2, completely detatching oneself from one's surroundings by wrapping screen-google around your head is an obviously fringe idea. On top of that it's a considerable hardware challenge so even something like Meta's upcoming chunky-but-more-or-less-normal-looking glasses will almost certainly be exorbitant. Why doesn't anybody start with a super simple pair of glasses that have text-only overlay. Also, no on-device ai or even significant compute, just connect via bluetooth to a phone. I get that Meta will never tie themselves to phones because they have a grudge against Apple, but again, why not Samsung or even Teenage Engineering? It seems crazy to say, but Google basically got the form factor right ~20 years ago with google glass. Now so much later shouldn't this be a lot easier to make a reality?

It wouldn't bother me so much, but after seeing so many distopian headsets and two or three ai pins in a short span, it really makes you wonder why simpler, more useful things don't come out.

[elmerfud]

Most phones are dockable nowadays it's just no one wants to do it. Single usb-c connection can output the phones video take keyboard and mouse input and away you go. As a matter of fact when I travel I have a portable monitor that is 4K touch screen and has a keyboard and trackpad with it as well. I will use that as a second monitor for my work laptop if I'm working but I'll plug it into my phone if I want a more powerful interface than the phone's touch screen. This kind of thing was touted early on in the smartphone development but I don't believe it's a thing that most people want anymore. Most non-computer interested people are happy to simply use their smartphone with the touch screen interface, most people who have the desire for a laptop or a desktop computer and a phone desire to keep those two things separate. That's why this really hasn't caught on but has been a thing for more than a decade now.

The glasses, there are several options already that are not VR that are simply display overlay. Here is a quick Google search result https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/xreal-air-vs-viture-xr-d...

I have no idea how good they are or the quality of them but they do exist outside of a full VR headset. One of the problems is is they have to reach a price point that people, even hobbyists, are willing to spend on them so they cannot be super high resolution displays because that drives the price up a lot. If you want them here they are.

[sfmz]

#1 is worse than laptops; who is going to provide all the docking infra?

#2 Open-source LLM AR https://brilliant.xyz/