I've been using the Moto G on T-Mobile for roughly 1 month and have nothing but great things to say about it. Fast, no bloatware, screen is brilliant, right size, available on all carriers (I believe). Best sub-$200 phone I've come across that feels state of the art.
I could be wrong, but Coolpad looks large (like a Note) whereas Moto G is small and easy to operate with one hand - which I prefer. Also, when I Google Coolpad 7320 my purchase options are eBay or AliExpress - and that's fine for many people, but I like to recommend a phone to a customer that they can walk into a retail store or Amazon and get easily. There's something to be said for that.
Anyone who downvoted bvvv want to say why? I probably would buy a Moto G over a Coolpad model personally, but his/her comment is topical, polite, and provides justification.
Maybe because the original post mentioned "right size" (so 4.5") and the smallest Coolpad is 5". Also, I wouldn't consider importing a chinese phone and buying a phone from Amazon or a physical store to be comparable. Good luck with your warranty on you chinese import, good luck with the roms to get a translation, etc... Maybe down-voters thought the same. Not the same category. If you go to the chinese import way, then there are many, many phones comparable to this "Coolpad".
Coolpad F1 has KitKat update. Coolpad 7320 is still on 4.2.2.
Bootloader is fine, to install custom ROM just press volume up and power and select .zip from SD card.
It works great. Screen, battery, wifi, GPS, and 3G signals are good. No crashes.
PS.
1. Speaker volume can be increased with MTKTools.
2. Root with latest version of Chinese VRoot (not english version).
3. USB disk doesn't show up in Windows for me, instead I use Total Commander with ADB plugin.
4. New Coolpad F2 will be better, with very fast MT6595.
I am very happy with my Moto G on PTEL. I don't know why PTEL isn't more popular. The coverage as far as I know is the same as t-mobile. Not the best, but it works for my location.
Glancing at them real quick, they're a T-Mobile MVNO and their mid-range unlimited plan is $50/month with 2GB of high-speed data. Straight Talk, which is usually on T-Mobile but depending on device and region also uses the other three major carriers, is $45 for an unlimited plan with 3GB of high-speed data. And MetroPCS, owned by T-Mobile, is also $50/month for a mid-range plan, but with 3GB of high-speed data.
Unless it has better roaming priority, I don't see what it brings to the table (maybe pay-as-you-go is a different story, though, if that's what you're interested in).
Potentially because T-Mobile direct offers the same plan for $5 cheaper than PTEL does. (TMO Simple Starter 2GB at $45/month vs PTEL 2GB 'Unlimited' for $50/month).
T-Mobile also has lots of advertising and lots of physical stores, which probably helps a bit.
Looks like Motorola have got the right approach to Android, a balanced device at a great price coupled with Android OS in its standard form. I may even be tempted to get this instead of a new Nexus.
The first time I read your comment I thought you were just saying that people always expect NFC to be a big thing really soon... I forgot about the big announcement actually happening next Tuesday.
> The first Moto G had no NFC though. Don't know if this one does yet. But NFC will very soon be a 'must have' feature.
I used NFC some on my Galaxy S3, and when I was buying the Moto G, I was a bit hesitant about going to a phone without NFC. But I have not once missed not having NFC. NFC has interesting prospects, but I have yet to see a real "must have" use for it.
Fair comment. I believe, though, that host card emulation, Android 4.4+ and tokenization are three key ideas that have come together and will put NFC into the mainstream (at last).
I've got NFC in my current phone, never used it, never needed to. Even with both Google and Apple backing contactless payments I suspect it will take a long time before it's the norm.
As much as I love the Nexus benefits, I really can't stand the weak batteries Google keeps putting in them. I'm sure it helps with the cost and form factor, but compared to other phones, the Nexus devices just drain out way, way too quickly.
I've never understood this either. I ended up buying the bigger battery for my GNex (the official Samsung extended battery, not a 3rd party one). Battery life is such a critical factor in smartphones, but time and time again it's ignored by the big players. With Android phones, Motorola has the best track record with regards to taking battery life seriously (the Droid Razr Maxx HD was almost the last phone I bought for this very reason).
While I am not thrilled about the bump in screen size. The Moto-G has been the best phone I have owned so far from a total ownership experience. No Contract, Decent Specs and Multi-Day Battery Life.
Ditto. Small(er) phones are getting harder and harder to find. If I could find a phone the same size as my Sony Xperia Ray with upgraded guts, I'd be ecstatic.
Even so the G has been great for me as well. I hope the new one has a better camera, that's really the Achilles heel of v1.
Well, smaller is definitely relative ;) - I think the Moto G is still a bit large (maybe an inch or so too tall?). But it's definitely one of the better ones of a bad bunch. (And I agree that it's an excellent phone overall, which feels a lot classier than its price tag, and that the camera is... functional.)
(It's strange, but bigger-is-better really seemed to have permeated the Android market. Whatever happpened to the opposite mindset, the one that gave us stuff like the Nokia 8210? The size of friends' iPhones - particularly the 4s - had really seemed just right, and I was rather disappointed when shopping for an Android equivalent to find they were all anywhere from large to hulking enormous by comparison. Even the so-called "Mini" ones were no better, being generally only the tiniest bit smaller than their non-Mini siblings.)
I really like my Moto G. It was the first smartphone that was nice enough, had a clean default Android UI, had enough battery life, cheap enough if I sit on it and it breaks, I won't be too upset over hardware cost.
Lots of people loved Moto G as a secondary/travel phone. But for me, it's my primary phone now, even though I consider myself an early adopter of cutting edge technology. Where I live, there are no carrier subsidies. This new trend of having a wonderful sub $200 phone is pretty neat. I don't need games, just a decent smartphone with calendar, email and a handful of other utilities. The recent evolutions in smartphone are pretty banal.
Other than the sub-par camera (low frame rate & grainy), Moto G (first version) is an amazing phone. It has great battery life, perfect screen size (for me), it's snappy, no bloatware. I'm not scared of dropping/losing it as much as I would with an iPhone.
I second this. It is my only phone, and aside from the camera, it is a great phone at an awesome price.
There has been a lot of discussion of screen size in the Moto X thread [0], and I tend to agree that the old Moto G's screen size was great. I previously had a Galaxy S3 and did not mind the larger screen, but after switching to the smaller Moto G screen, I much prefer the 4.5". It is still big enough, but the battery life is far better. My cursory checking of the battery stats for both phones showed that generally the screen use was the driving factor in battery life, so I was happy to make the tradeoff to a smaller screen in exchange for a longer-lasting charge.
I honestly don't notice anything wrong with a 720p screen at that size. Sure it may not be retina, but I don't care as long as my battery lasts all day (it does and into the next day).
Being able to pass out at a strange house and not have to worry about my cellphone in the morning is freeing.
That's true. The processor+RAM are sufficient for most stuff. I haven't stressed it because I don't have a need for that. I hope the manufacturers take a lesson and stop pushing GHz in every person's face like they do with megapixels (unfortunately it hits diminishing returns pretty fast). But seriously, if one wants to be in a market that's rapidly getting commoditized, learn from Moto or Xiaomi, don't idolize Samsung.
It's baffling that Google sold off Motorola right when they finally have a pipeline of really nice competitive devices coming out. I wonder if it was competitive worries from Samsung that got them to sell.
I always figured that they just didn't really want to be in that business. It creates a conflict with the other phone manufacturers as well. From Google's point of view having a robust Android ecosystem is more important than building phones.
Shareholders didn't like them being in the lower-margin hardware business; other Android OEMs didn't like having them as a competitor. And all the "analysts" (for whatever their words are worth) are saying that even Samsung is/will be feeling the heat from Chinese handset makers -- such as Huawei, ZTE, Xiaomi, Coolpad and, not coincidentally, Lenovo.
I think in part they achieved what they want to which was to accelerate what was available at the $200 price point.
The other manufacturers while not a cartel where in no hurry to reduces pricess and the stuff available at point was horrible shit like the Orange San Francisco.
Buying Moto was the biggest, costliest mistake Google ever made. Spend a lot. Annoy OEM partners. ???? Profit? These are nice devices, but so are Nexus, Google Play Edition, and Android One devices. Google does not lack for GTM routes for crapware-free, low-cost Androids.
I'm not sure how you could make an evaluation like this without knowing the scope of the patents they kept, which by all accounts was the reason for the acquisition in the first place.
After they bought Moto, the patent wars raged on. The value of the patents is by now evident. Even after the patents and real estate and spin-outs of the STB and other non-mobile OEM businesses, Google lost billions of dollars and spent 10s of man years of senior management attention on restructuring Moto and preventing Moto's stodgy, risk averse telecom industry employees from infecting Google.
Moto is a far better company now, but also a much smaller and lower-value company.
One could also say buying Nokia was Microsoft's biggest brain fart. Google has managed to clean house faster.
The Android ecosystem is so fragmented. I've had an Android phone since the Nexus One (in which I RMA'd 3 of them in the span of a year). Here I am on a Nexus 4 and it's had its fair share of problems. Namely random restarts, freezing, volume buttons non responsive, etc. The battery life pales in comparison to all my friends with iPhones, so I'm really excited to be switching to the iPhone for the first time.
I don't need to hack my phone which I feel like is what everyone always sells Android as e.g. "It's so customizable", "can you do X on an iPhone?". I want to make phone calls. And use maps.
I heavily use Google Voice, but from what I hear, it's being rendered obsolete in favor of hangouts (which I'm very opposed to).
Is anybody else impressed that this is basically better in technical specifications to the netbooks of yor, in the size of a phone, for <$180 off contract?
Yeah I know hardware always keeps getting better and cheaper, but still when you stand back for a second, and think about it, it's kind of wow. I guess the innovation here is making a decent device that's cheap, but the fact that it's cheap and small and has good specs and battery life? Wowzers.
Yet, I almost wish these devices did a little bit more to work in non-handheld modes. I'd be happy to ditch my laptop for most things if I could get better interface access to the hardware in a modern smartphone, even if the interface wasn't optimal, an impromptu computing environment at a coffee shop would be pretty nice. Hell, I just got a Note 3, and it's just about as powerful as the desktop I replaced at the end of last year. I'd wager it's too powerful for most of the mobile junk I do with it. Plopping it down on a table next to my coffee and just turning it onto "computer" mode would be pretty amazing.
Something like what's outlined here with pico projectors.
Another issue is that, when phone shopping, it's hard enough to tell what are the newer devices vs what are the models on the way out (and on the way out of being supported). $180 is just about at the price of phones that are on the way out vs. ~$300 for phones that are current models. It won't matter to many people, but unless the phone sales guy tells you, or you're up to date on current phone releases, you might give this a pass.
I'd actually be pretty happy if it just projected a reasonable-to-use keyboard on the table. I could work off the screen on a Note, it's big enough and high resolution enough for lots of work.
edit I'm thinking basically of this use-case, but with the projector in the phone.
Shell access by default. A complete unix toolset. Some type of init system I can hook into to run daemons.
Logically separated layers. Not "you don't like the display server... well you have to re-implement everything from scratch yourself". You know, normal computer things.
I want a desk with one or more large displays, a keyboard and a mouse where I can "plop" my phone into a docking station for charging and use it instantly as my desktop work station environment for "work". Then I to be able to pick it up when I leave or when the phone rings.
Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, of course, already on the desk. Chromecast hooked up to the monitor. Use one of the Android automation apps to automatically mirror the display via Chromecast when the phone is in range of the BT keyboard / mouse on your desk and when it is laying flat on a surface (plopped onto the desk).
Not perfect. Chromecast latency might be an issue. You would still have to plug it into a charger if you don't have wireless charging. But it should work.
To kill the screen latency, you could use Miracast, which seems to be much faster than the chromecast (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-5JJhKMph8) or connect a cable (best solution: no heat because of the video encoding, can recharge the phone with MHL, no lag). Also one issue would be the DPI. Working with the big android elements on a, say, 24 inch screen would be a pain. But maybe you could automate a DPI change to rescale the whole interface.
Don't believe the hype of pico projectors. I have one on a Sony camcorder and it's really not useful at all. You need a very dark room to get a good image. To make something usable in normal light conditions would require a super powerful multi-watt LED with big heatsinks and maybe even a fan.
I remember seeing some early laser based projectors awhile ago that produced something reasonably usable inside during day time. But that was 7 or 8 years ago. I've heard that there are some laser-based pico projectors about to come out, they might be better vs. an LED based projector.
There's some tiny bluetooth keyboard projectors that now use green laser light and are very bright.
Here's a vendor that apparently sells them (but I couldn't find any pictures of the green keyboard versions).
"Plopping it down on a table next to my coffee and just turning it onto "computer" mode would be pretty amazing."
Yeah, I'm excited about this possibility too. It's a shame Canonical couldn't get the Ubuntu on Android project off the ground (too little interest from phone manufacturers/carriers AFAIR). However, all is not lost, there's another project working on this kind of convergence, will happily install their Android ROM when it's ready... https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/linuxonandroid
I've actually wanted this for my car too... I've thought for several years, if there was a near-field really high speed bluetooth style interface that was similar to chromecast + touch... basically your screen in your car, when your phone is docked (near) the system will now yeild control to your phone... calls, audio, video, touch are all interfaces in the car, for the phone.
The same could be done for a desktop-like computing environment... for that matter a laptop shell... just a battery, screen, keyboard, trackpad that your phone controls.
We're really at a point where this should be doable and eminent... if say Tesla and Apple could get together on this (with very liberal licensing for other companies, as long as they meet the full spec) would be the most likely chance of this getting out there and succeeding.
The iPhone 5s, with the "desktop class" A7 chip, has about 15% of the computing power of an i7 4770k, by this benchmark.
Personally, I don't use mobile devices - neither phones nor laptops - for compute-heavy operations. Everything from compilation to video transcoding takes way longer than on a decent desktop. Phones are not close to threatening that yet, not by a long shot.
Trivial work, like text editing, light photo manipulation, sure. Anything that could be done on a PC 15 years ago, sure. But they're nowhere near one another.
Yep, I think the A8 (or A7X) could be really close to the performances of entry level CPUs used in MacBook air! An A7 scores 2564 and an i3-3217U 3095. But if you look at the Atom Bay Trail, which scores 2630, you see that Intel did a nice coming back in the mobile segment, at least for tablets.
In the case of a quad cortex A7, like the one in the Moto G, or the MediaTek MT6589 in the bench comparison, we see that the performances are too bad to replace a laptop. With a score of 1258 it is comparable of the best good old netbooks with Intel Atom.
> Personally, I don't use mobile devices - neither phones nor laptops - for compute-heavy operations. Everything from compilation to video transcoding takes way longer than on a decent desktop. Phones are not close to threatening that yet, not by a long shot.
One option is to run compute-heavy stuff on a networked server, which you SSH into from a lightweight phone/tablet/Chromebook. I can definitely see myself working like that, if I could get a phone or tablet with a docking station.
Wow, I installed Windows 8 on a T7100 (1.8Ghz) and it runs super smoothly, but some people were complaining of Tegra 3 windows RT tablet being slow? (try googling "tegra 3 windows RT slow") That is weird! Can we really trust those benchmark for real day to day comparison? Or maybe I don't have the same speed expectation as the tablet users?
I'd actually be interested in some kind of direct comparison of the single core atom in my 2007 era netbook compared to whatever is in this phone as well as to my note 3.
Atom from back then really did suck, though. In-order, etc. This thing has one of the newer Qualcomm ARM cores, which are reasonably wide out-of-order.
Android makes it simple to have access to all your documents on multiple devices. That means OEMs are far more likely to make "super tablets," like the 12-13" 4k tablets in prototype stage earlier this year, than external displays for handsets.
I would like to find a Bluetooth keyboard in a folding case, that when opened up had a recessed spot to hold the phone, and a big magnifying (12 inch?) lens in the front. Possibly a Fresnel lens, if it can be made so that the ridges doesn't distort the screen image and cause weird patterns.
It is indeed very impressive. The shitiest smartphone on the market today is still an absolute technical wonder.
Google's goal with Android has always been to commoditize smartphones. It would probably have happened either way (even high end smartphones are heavily subsidized after all) but maybe not that fast.
Motorola has been very good at embracing this. Their Moto G is by no mean perfect, but it is an excellent phone at an affordable price.
The 'race to bottom' is often decried in our era obsessed with profits and money, but bringing this kind of first grade technology to anyone on the planet is a pretty good goal.
I am very excited by what Android One will be able to bring. It is time for this kind of project : it is now possible to build good smartphones at low prices.
Even as a mobile developer, phone launchs are pretty boring. There has not been a major breakthrough in quite some time and I suspect that they are going to be increasingly rare.
I would really love to go with a $199 off-contract phone and switch to Straight Talk. Sprint MVNO's are terrible where I live. Then again I'd only be saving $50/month...
Best Sprint MVNO is Ting. You, essentially, pay for what you use. My bill averages about $20 a month. There are some limitations on which phones you can use. Most Android flagship phones are available at launch. For things like the iPhone, Sprint has to give permission for Ting to activate them. The general rule is that once it has been a year since the phone came out on the Sprint network, you can take the used device to Sprint. Here is their latest update about upcoming devices:
I saw a motorola support replied to someone on Twitter to say it's "TFT LCD". I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the verge describe it as AMOLED, but I think they have it wrong.
If you use your smartphone to mostly browse the web, use google apps (gmail, hangouts, gmaps, youtube), and don't mind waiting 6-12 months for the hot new app to come to Android, the MotoG is a fantastic device. The LTE version is just $220, and I don't really see the point of paying 3x the price ($650) for an iPhone.
Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows extensions and it's only supported on Android, so you can install Adblock Edge and browse the mobile web free from any ads!!
That's an expensive way to finance your purchases.
Your credit is your own business of course. But if it's just a random idea you had, you'll save a lot more money switching to pre-paid, and buying the hardware you want outright.
Plus that'll give you flexibility you didn't have before (to switch carriers when/if you feel like it, without penalty).
+1. I'm very happy with TMobile's $30/mo prepaid plan. You get 5gb of data (LTE), unlimited texting, and 100 minutes of talktime. If 100 minutes is too low, you can get unlimited minutes with Skype for $9/mo ($6 for a skype number, $3 for the unlimited minutes).
Not only that, there is this wonderful technology known as a hyper link. Why, in the name of all the heavens, doesn't anyone make that asterisk a link, instead of making you search for it? It drives me insane.
172 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadCoolpad 7320 (bought for $139!, 5.5'') and Coolpad F1 (5'') are better for me.
- Faster
- Much better camera
- Dual sim. Very important for me because I can use free unlimited internet on secondary card.
- MicroSD
- Bigger screen space - no Android buttons bar on bottom.
- Same high quality. Coolpad is 6th biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world.
I compared my Coolpad 7320 with real (hands on) Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and it's quite similar.
(edited post a bit)
Coolpad F1: 71.5 x 141 x 9.3 mm, 151g
It works great. Screen, battery, wifi, GPS, and 3G signals are good. No crashes.
PS. 1. Speaker volume can be increased with MTKTools. 2. Root with latest version of Chinese VRoot (not english version). 3. USB disk doesn't show up in Windows for me, instead I use Total Commander with ADB plugin. 4. New Coolpad F2 will be better, with very fast MT6595.
Very likely a astroturfer working for Coolpad (not too say that the phone isn't better or worse than Moto G).
You can buy it with either the US or worldwide GSM frequencies.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/09/04/the-new-moto-g-leaks...
repeat 10x
I'm guessing a LTE variant is in the works, since last years Moto G got an LTE variant.
"Availability: Pre-Order"
I've been trying to see if it supports LTE or HSDPA, but I can't see it on their specs page...
Glancing at them real quick, they're a T-Mobile MVNO and their mid-range unlimited plan is $50/month with 2GB of high-speed data. Straight Talk, which is usually on T-Mobile but depending on device and region also uses the other three major carriers, is $45 for an unlimited plan with 3GB of high-speed data. And MetroPCS, owned by T-Mobile, is also $50/month for a mid-range plan, but with 3GB of high-speed data.
Unless it has better roaming priority, I don't see what it brings to the table (maybe pay-as-you-go is a different story, though, if that's what you're interested in).
Potentially because T-Mobile direct offers the same plan for $5 cheaper than PTEL does. (TMO Simple Starter 2GB at $45/month vs PTEL 2GB 'Unlimited' for $50/month).
T-Mobile also has lots of advertising and lots of physical stores, which probably helps a bit.
I used NFC some on my Galaxy S3, and when I was buying the Moto G, I was a bit hesitant about going to a phone without NFC. But I have not once missed not having NFC. NFC has interesting prospects, but I have yet to see a real "must have" use for it.
Even so the G has been great for me as well. I hope the new one has a better camera, that's really the Achilles heel of v1.
(It's strange, but bigger-is-better really seemed to have permeated the Android market. Whatever happpened to the opposite mindset, the one that gave us stuff like the Nokia 8210? The size of friends' iPhones - particularly the 4s - had really seemed just right, and I was rather disappointed when shopping for an Android equivalent to find they were all anywhere from large to hulking enormous by comparison. Even the so-called "Mini" ones were no better, being generally only the tiniest bit smaller than their non-Mini siblings.)
Car driving over Moto G:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzI-Cd3SYVE
30 minutes under water:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVaTKG5q4YI
Under water and scratch test:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-wzY4v1a0c
Other than the sub-par camera (low frame rate & grainy), Moto G (first version) is an amazing phone. It has great battery life, perfect screen size (for me), it's snappy, no bloatware. I'm not scared of dropping/losing it as much as I would with an iPhone.
There has been a lot of discussion of screen size in the Moto X thread [0], and I tend to agree that the old Moto G's screen size was great. I previously had a Galaxy S3 and did not mind the larger screen, but after switching to the smaller Moto G screen, I much prefer the 4.5". It is still big enough, but the battery life is far better. My cursory checking of the battery stats for both phones showed that generally the screen use was the driving factor in battery life, so I was happy to make the tradeoff to a smaller screen in exchange for a longer-lasting charge.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272745
Being able to pass out at a strange house and not have to worry about my cellphone in the morning is freeing.
I also have Moto G first gen. It launches every game I through at without any problem.
The other manufacturers while not a cartel where in no hurry to reduces pricess and the stuff available at point was horrible shit like the Orange San Francisco.
Moto is a far better company now, but also a much smaller and lower-value company.
One could also say buying Nokia was Microsoft's biggest brain fart. Google has managed to clean house faster.
I don't need to hack my phone which I feel like is what everyone always sells Android as e.g. "It's so customizable", "can you do X on an iPhone?". I want to make phone calls. And use maps.
I heavily use Google Voice, but from what I hear, it's being rendered obsolete in favor of hangouts (which I'm very opposed to).
Like Symbian, Series30, Series40, -DOS, NIX, Windows, ....
Yeah I know hardware always keeps getting better and cheaper, but still when you stand back for a second, and think about it, it's kind of wow. I guess the innovation here is making a decent device that's cheap, but the fact that it's cheap and small and has good specs and battery life? Wowzers.
Yet, I almost wish these devices did a little bit more to work in non-handheld modes. I'd be happy to ditch my laptop for most things if I could get better interface access to the hardware in a modern smartphone, even if the interface wasn't optimal, an impromptu computing environment at a coffee shop would be pretty nice. Hell, I just got a Note 3, and it's just about as powerful as the desktop I replaced at the end of last year. I'd wager it's too powerful for most of the mobile junk I do with it. Plopping it down on a table next to my coffee and just turning it onto "computer" mode would be pretty amazing.
Something like what's outlined here with pico projectors.
https://pdf.yt/d/J5nSHPu5dzdpWwvn
Another issue is that, when phone shopping, it's hard enough to tell what are the newer devices vs what are the models on the way out (and on the way out of being supported). $180 is just about at the price of phones that are on the way out vs. ~$300 for phones that are current models. It won't matter to many people, but unless the phone sales guy tells you, or you're up to date on current phone releases, you might give this a pass.
edit I'm thinking basically of this use-case, but with the projector in the phone.
http://www.brookstone.com/laser-projection-virtual-keyboard
edit apparently this is as close as is available (almost)
http://www.ctxtechnologies.com/products/vk300-iphone-docking...
Logically separated layers. Not "you don't like the display server... well you have to re-implement everything from scratch yourself". You know, normal computer things.
Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, of course, already on the desk. Chromecast hooked up to the monitor. Use one of the Android automation apps to automatically mirror the display via Chromecast when the phone is in range of the BT keyboard / mouse on your desk and when it is laying flat on a surface (plopped onto the desk).
Not perfect. Chromecast latency might be an issue. You would still have to plug it into a charger if you don't have wireless charging. But it should work.
There's some tiny bluetooth keyboard projectors that now use green laser light and are very bright.
Here's a vendor that apparently sells them (but I couldn't find any pictures of the green keyboard versions).
Some of their interesting devices
http://www.ctxtechnologies.com/products/misteex/
http://www.ctxtechnologies.com/products/vk300-iphone-docking...
Yeah, I'm excited about this possibility too. It's a shame Canonical couldn't get the Ubuntu on Android project off the ground (too little interest from phone manufacturers/carriers AFAIR). However, all is not lost, there's another project working on this kind of convergence, will happily install their Android ROM when it's ready... https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/linuxonandroid
The same could be done for a desktop-like computing environment... for that matter a laptop shell... just a battery, screen, keyboard, trackpad that your phone controls.
We're really at a point where this should be doable and eminent... if say Tesla and Apple could get together on this (with very liberal licensing for other companies, as long as they meet the full spec) would be the most likely chance of this getting out there and succeeding.
These devices come nowhere close to competing with traditional computers. Not yet...
I posit that phones outperform laptops for a lot of people (possibly because upgrading your phone is more widely encouraged).
For historical perspective, Core 2 Duos are from 2006/7. And T7200 is a laptop version, slower than desktop equivalents of the same era.
Desktop CPUs are still much, much faster than phone CPUs. Here's a table with lots of numbers:
http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks...
The iPhone 5s, with the "desktop class" A7 chip, has about 15% of the computing power of an i7 4770k, by this benchmark.
Personally, I don't use mobile devices - neither phones nor laptops - for compute-heavy operations. Everything from compilation to video transcoding takes way longer than on a decent desktop. Phones are not close to threatening that yet, not by a long shot.
Trivial work, like text editing, light photo manipulation, sure. Anything that could be done on a PC 15 years ago, sure. But they're nowhere near one another.
In the case of a quad cortex A7, like the one in the Moto G, or the MediaTek MT6589 in the bench comparison, we see that the performances are too bad to replace a laptop. With a score of 1258 it is comparable of the best good old netbooks with Intel Atom.
One option is to run compute-heavy stuff on a networked server, which you SSH into from a lightweight phone/tablet/Chromebook. I can definitely see myself working like that, if I could get a phone or tablet with a docking station.
So they are around, just hard to find.
Motorola has been very good at embracing this. Their Moto G is by no mean perfect, but it is an excellent phone at an affordable price.
The 'race to bottom' is often decried in our era obsessed with profits and money, but bringing this kind of first grade technology to anyone on the planet is a pretty good goal. I am very excited by what Android One will be able to bring. It is time for this kind of project : it is now possible to build good smartphones at low prices.
Even as a mobile developer, phone launchs are pretty boring. There has not been a major breakthrough in quite some time and I suspect that they are going to be increasingly rare.
https://ting.com/blog/device-update-didja-miss-us-2/
They even have a signup for notifications when the iPhone 5S/C is available.
https://ting.com/blog/be-the-first-to-know/
Also, Firefox is the only mobile browser that allows extensions and it's only supported on Android, so you can install Adblock Edge and browse the mobile web free from any ads!!
I just don't use my phone enough to play games or mess around with apps.
Your credit is your own business of course. But if it's just a random idea you had, you'll save a lot more money switching to pre-paid, and buying the hardware you want outright.
Plus that'll give you flexibility you didn't have before (to switch carriers when/if you feel like it, without penalty).
The footnotes on the page say:
* Officially licensed College Cases by UnCommon.
which makes no sense.
It's annoyingly common when sites put asterisks on things but never actually include the footnotes it's supposed to refer to.