Mirroring Smartphone on the Framework : screen, keyboard, mouse

Creators & Developers
1

Smartphones have been a game changer to bring 95% more users around 2007.
I recall just before 2007 and the iphone a time where mostely geeks computer and workers would use computers and internet.

Now I see a trend -and big companies like samsung aswell - where people are working with their phone and want to do more…reinventing by the way something that already exist…A laptop ! tada :smiley:
It hard to inovate and forsee the future, even apple has a track record of lot of fails.

What I propose here is a POC; where you could plug your smartphone on a USB 4 port on the current 12th gen board; once plugged & after pushing a fn key :

  • The screen will be mirrored
  • the keyboard would be routed to the phone
  • the mouse aswell

I amagine that it would require some BIOS and EC programming and heavy testing.
If that would suceed, eventually a very basic board (with a lowcost cpu) would be created. Enabling people to buy everything but the costely board (400€), making a full premium solution for smartphone users at a cost around 600€.
PS: I already knwo at least 2 persons around me that would buy it.

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2

There are guys already DIYing stuff :smiley:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=DIY+Portable+Screen+from

3

It sounds to me like OP is describing a device with the form factor of a laptop. Many devices like this already exist:

These do require a phone to be functional, of course, but they’re also much cheaper than a fully-functional laptop.

4

Well, there is a opensource software solution for this, which works amazingly well.
scrcpy (screencopy) which does exactly what you described (mirroring screen and pass keyboard) and more (pass mouse, clipboard exchange with the laptop OS, recording, webcam function, etc.).
This can be accompanied by sndcpy to even passover sound from the phone to the laptop.
It works only with Android-based phones and yeah, you need a full functional laptop with a host OS, so maybe not exactly what you were looking for.

If you would like to get full hardware. A USB-C monitor (I use a Lenovo M14t) works well, if the phone supports USB-C passthrough. Add a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and you are almost there.

That said, usually people would love that the phone scales well with the extended screen size, so it is not just the hardware but having a keyboard, a mouse and a big screen you would like to have a real desktop experience, with multiple windows in parallel, working space and small icons as you can precisely click them with your mouse cursor. So additional software is required too. Ubuntu tried this for some time with their own Linux OS, running on a smartphone and scaling accordingly, trying being a phone or a desktop. Unfortunately, they gave up.

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