I previously wrote about the possibility of transferring work between devices as an alternative to “convergence” (using a phone or tablet as a desktop) [1]. This idea has been implemented in some commercial products already.
MrWhosTheBoss made a good YouTube video reviewing recent Huawei products [2]. At 2:50 in that video he shows how you can link a phone and tablet, control one from the other, drag and drop of running apps and files between phone and tablet, mirror the screen between devices, etc. He describes playing a video on one device and having it appear on the other, I hope that it actually launches a new instance of the player app as the Google Chromecast failed in the market due to remote display being laggy. At 7:30 in that video he starts talking about the features that are available when you have multiple Huawei devices, starting with the ability to move a Bluetooth pairing for earphones to a different device.
At 16:25 he shows what Huawei is doing to get apps going including allowing apk files to be downloaded and creating what they call “Quick Apps” which are instances of a web browser configured to just use one web site and make it look like a discrete app, we need something like this for FOSS phone distributions – does anyone know of a browser that’s good for it?
Another thing that we need is to have an easy way of transferring open web pages between systems. Chrome allows sending pages between systems but it’s proprietary, limited to Chrome only, and also takes an unreasonable amount of time. KDEConnect allows sharing clipboard contents which can be used to send URLs that can then be pasted into a browser, but the process of copy URL, send via KDEConnect, and paste into other device is unreasonably slow. The design of Chrome with a “Send to your devices” menu option from the tab bar is OK. But ideally we need a “Send to device” for all tabs of a window as well, we need it to run from free software and support using your own server not someone else’s server (AKA “the cloud”). Some of the KDEConnect functionality but using a server rather than direct connection over the same Wifi network (or LAN if bridged to Wifi) would be good.
What else do we need?
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