Vodafone + Canonical Working On A "Cloud Smartphone"

[BesiegedAce]

Wasn't this idea already tried (and failed) before? Robin phone or something...

[sarmad]

What a terrible idea. How much data will you need to purchase from the carrier for this, and how big of a battery you'll need? Also, phones have weaker data bandwidth compared to laptops so you'll have a lot of service interruptions and lag.

[Mario Junior]

And here we go again...

[skeevy420]

"Hello, 911?"

"We're sorry, your subscription to cloud based calling has expired. To continue reporting your emergency, please provide a credit card number now"

I get that basic functions like phone calls are supposedly still done on the device, but the above joke gets closer to reality the more stuff like this gets announced.

911 is the one of the few numbers that works from a disconnected phone. Don't even need a sim card to call 911.

Don't get me wrong, I get the joke you're trying to make. I hate dystopic, hyper-capitalist technology as much as any of us, but this isn't it. The joke here is more like "We're sorry, the call cannot connect using this slow network. To continue calling 911 please locate a wireless network with at least 49mbps down and 23mbps up. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

Me: But I'm on 5G.
Hacker: That's what you get for going with AT&T. Now give me the password or I'll use the $5 wrench again.

I do think it's a really neat concept, that the core technology is sound, and could be a great way to repurpose old phones relegated to the tech drawer due to the host your own features Anbox has. I have a few phones with good screens and cameras that I can think of uses for. My Android TV for that matter. It has a POS CPU and GPU and it'd be nice to setup Anbox Cloud to have my Ryzen PC power my SmartTV. Back when I compiled Android roms it would have been really awesome to be able to fire up an Anbox server and test my rom that way.

Not all of the uses for this are bad or evil. A lot of them are literally the "repurpose my old stuff" arguments a lot of us use for keeping older devices. Do any of y'all have any experience using Shells.com; preferably on a laptop over 4G or 5G? That seems to be like this for desktops. So if anyone has any experience using that it would be interesting to hear your perspective on remote provided desktops.

Frankly, how we're responding to this says a lot more about our cultures and societies than it does about the technology in and of itself.

[kpedersen]

They will make a mess of it, fill up some space in a landfill and then blame "open-source" for the reason it failed.

Good job guys. Please leave us alone.

[marlock]

People are mostly reacting to the proposed use, not to the underlying tech... and to whom proposed it, which is only fair as a modulation to the expected outcome

That being said, the tech is definitely better for other contexts than a smartphone, Vodafone or not, metered and unreliable internet or not


Also in terms of usability I have successfully used VMs and even cloud VMs (my work's IT-managed Win10 VM over my personal linux laptop) and the experience was OK (at home over an unmetered >=100mbps WiFi)... but even then there was annoying lag both over Microsoft Azure and over a VMWare VM running company servers in a nearby location

battery-wise the critics is also valid... receiving a 1080p video stream plus hifi audio constantly and decompressing it is less taxing than the most demanding apps but A LOT more taxing than an idle phone or light usage (think calculator, whatsapp, calendar, alarm, etc)... how many hours of that can a phone handle?

is the screen-wake / unlock event going to restart the video stream? how's notification handling on the lock screen gonna work?

give me the anbox cloud (or better yet an anbox microservice that can be deployed flexibly on the cloud or as a self-hosted as I please) over a librem 5 or a PinePhone and I'm dancing happy

give it to me vodafone-cloud-locked and as the only usability path on the device and it's IMHO really mostly junk

[pLdvJbMV]

Vodafone rebrands low end Alcatel phones so I'm presuming they're trying to make the dreadful burner level phones more functional.
AFAIK Vodafone haven't had a 1080 screen since 2017 with the V8 model so that should tell you something.

[Developer12]

"This isn't like the days of the failed Ubuntu Touch / Ubuntu Phone effort"

[PINEPHONE WILL REMEMBER THAT]

[Paradigm Shifter]

The joke here is more like "We're sorry, the call cannot connect using this slow network. To continue calling 911 please locate a wireless network with at least 49mbps down and 23mbps up. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

Me: But I'm on 5G.
Hacker: That's what you get for going with AT&T. Now give me the password or I'll use the $5 wrench again.

Obligatory XKCD. (You know which one before you even click...)

Any lag on a device is unacceptable. It's just painful.

[jacob]

This seems like such an absolutely horrible idea. A phone is a portable device. Streaming is best on a fast, wired connection.

Why the hell did Canonical agree to this.

Also a phone is where various private and personal data are stored. There is no way in hell I would ever want that to touch a cloud.