Your next PC may be your phone.
I saw this new docking station for the Galaxy 8 online the other day. I was like, "whoa, did that just happen?" Rather than use a PC or laptop, it may be possible in the near future, it not already, to simply run all your programs and apps on your smartphone. Goodbye lumbering PC! Forget synchronizing files. Forget backing up!
It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Today's smart phones have more power than PCs did in the past. And they can do most everything a PC does - read your e-mails, create documents, play videos, play music, text, skype, video games - whatever.
In fact, you can do this today with most Samsung phones and televisions. My old Galaxy S4 has a feature called "screen mirroring" that will display the smart phone screen on a compatible television. My Samsung television, for some reason, calls this feature "Miracast" but it does work. You can stream a video on your phone to the television and it is basically impossible to distinguish over a video streamed through the router to the television. Interesting stuff.
And with more people storing things in the cloud, the need to store files on a hard drive or other physical location may diminish as well. However, if this docking station has a USB hub, there is no reason you can't hook it up to a 1TB hard drive and back up all the junk on your phone or whatever.
Samsung doesn't seem to be pushing this idea too much right now, which tells me they are still sort of Beta testing it. And I never want to be an early adapter of anything. But it gets me to thinking that I will be in no hurry to replace my remaining PC (one died) and laptops anytime soon, at least for a year or two.
Because by then, this smart-phone-as-PC thing will be mainstream, and maybe the final nail will be in the coffin of the PC. We'll see.
All I can say is, Oh, brave new world!
