I bought an Android phone that transforms into a desktop computer when you plug in a USB-C monitor, and the entire experience is mind blowing. You can even connect a bluetooth keyboard and use the phone screen as a touchpad. Unfortunately I don't think Apple is going to go in that direction anytime soon.
Ooooh more info please! Which phone? And what's the experience like? Are you using it for development at all or is it more things like word? I wanna know all about this setup, since I'm definitely going to need to upgrade my phone soon.
Any Samsung flagship will work (make sure it supports DeX). All the first party apps and plenty of store ones have a desktop UI. I haven't tried any native IDEs yet, but a cloud editor in the browser works perfect.
Rumour has it Google are going to introduce a desktop mode with the Pixel 8. In the mean time there's Samsung DeX, Motorola Ready For, and Huawei Easy Projection. If it has desktop mode I'll be getting the Pixel 8, if not the Samsung Galaxy S22. Pair it with a Quadlock Mag Case and the battery pack attachment and you just have one cable going from your phone to your AR glasses and you can quickly and easily swap battery packs when needed.
You can do dev work using the Termux terminal and online VSCode/Codespaces/CodeCatalyst or someone recently (like just this week I think) ported a native version of VSCode to the Play store.
I have had a number of Samsung devices that I bought specifically to test out the DeX capabilities, and it's really hard to say whether I recommend it. I ended up going back to a real PC, and it was such a breath of fresh air.
My setup was: Anker A8383 USB-C hub, 1440p 120hz monitor, USB keyboard/mouse
-Apps close themselves even when the RAM isn't full, and the "RAM Plus" feature which gives you 8 GB of swap on a 12GB RAM phone doesn't necessarily fix it.
-Multiple apps can play audio at the same time if you install Sound Assistant and enable the requisite feature (multi-app sound). Similarly, you should get the Good Guardians and Good Lock apps from the Galaxy store (or apkmirror if in Canada) and tinker with the settings to taste. This is necessary to get 4K60 support or anything more than 1080p.
-I use Kiwi Browser, which supports all Chrome extensions and otherwise works like normal desktop Chrome. You'll want to go into the flags and enable the zoom thing (search for zoom) and then enable the zoom option under Accessbility in Kiwi settings, to fix websites that don't scale correctly. Tabs get unloaded/lazy loaded in background due to RAM issue.
-Doing anything moderately describable as "productive" or "intensive" (example: google maps website) creates more heat than the phone can handle over more than 10 minutes. Do not buy a Snapdragon 888, or other weak processor device (I am aware it is old but some people like used phones). Things like particles.js, hidden autoplays, etc that don't cause issues on desktop waste TDP on phones. The problem isn't necessarily that the phone overheats, it's that Samsung makes it so that not only does the battery stop charging if it gets over 36 C, it actually starts draining. For reference, your body temperature is around 36 C. On the S23 Ultra, with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, it's more or less usable now, with some battery drain from time to time. Weirdly, the battery drain issue is solved if you use a charger that supports USB PD PPS. The PPS part is VERY important. If you look at Samsung schematics, you will see that the PMIC does normal USB PD and there's a separate chip for PPS. Not all docks support PPS, in fact I'm not certain if ANY do. This is an area where more research is required. Of course, the fact that the PPS chip isn't affected might not be a thermal issue, but rather a "Samsung forgot to throttle charging on PPS", which would not be a good thing to talk about then because I don't want them to "fix" this.
-I cannot imagine development would be particularly easy on this device. I briefly looked into getting VSCode on there and whatnot but the Android Linux projects seem to have fallen quite some from their former glory. While web based stuff is likely fine, the aforementioned memory and CPU problems will make this difficult to use for anything too serious.
-All of the current common remote desktop solutions i.e. RustDesk (slow performance), Parsec (keyboard issues, no zoom), Reemo (mostly works, no keyboard shortcuts, lag, thermal problems), TeamViewer (3fps), Moonlight (mouse capture issue, thermal problems), RDP (low fps) etc have some kind of usability problem that makes them difficult to use for this application, in case you wanted to use the phone as a thin client.
I don't understand why you wouldn't just use VSCode/Codespaces or Cloud9/CodeCatalyst. The big cloud providers have their own remote desktop solutions now e.g AWS Workspaces, Azure Virtual Desktop that you can just use in the browser or if you want to stream a single app there's AWS AppStream and Azure RemoteApp.
S22 ultra works out of box. I plugged once my phone by mistake at work to some more advanced usbc cable for connecting our HP notebooks for all data and power to their dock, and immediately colleague's massive ultrawide screen turned on and showed whole phone's display in what seemed native resolution.
It was also rotating screen as I was rotating the phone. Nothing installed nor enabled on top of default install, didnt even know it could do it.
I'm kind of doing this with iPad, and microsoft remote desktop. it allows me to just carry an ipad and be able to access my CAD machine in work. Love it.
Be careful, though. Last I tried (iphone 7), you needed 3rd party bluetooth mouse, apple iphone worked with all mouses except apple one.
Also, you had the scary "this device causes radio interference" (do not remember the exact wording) warning from the apple trackpad on the apple ipad.
