Razer Project Linda turns your phone into a laptop By The Verge

(uplifting music) - Hey, it's Chaim with The Verge, and I'm here at CES with Razer's new Project Linda prototype. Every year at CES, Razer always brings a new and interesting prototype to kind of show off some ideas for the future of computing. This year's is Project Linda, which is a laptop dock for the Razer phone. Basically, take your Razer phone, and you put it in the center of the laptop over here, and you hit this docking button. A USBC connector extends into the phone, and it brings it up on the laptop as a full laptop experience. You can see those apps which are running in full desktop or tablet mode.

Here's The Verge website. You can still, there are hardware keys to access things like Google Assistant and hardware keys to access core Android functions, like the back button and the app switcher. You can also pop up games or productivity software, like Lightroom, which runs in this tablet mode, but this is, obviously, much more of a usable work environment to get things done than necessarily trying to do it on a phone. Razer is eventually hoping to be able to develop this to the point where you can actually run different content on the two screens. So, you can have, for example, Lightroom open and have a palette picker on here.

You can plug in a mouse on the side, but the idea is really to extend the capabilities of what your phone can do into more of a laptop setting. Instead of just mirroring the phone, the Project Linda prototype actually also charges it while it's plugged in. The idea being that when you're using it on the laptop, when you take it out, your phone will have more charge than when you started. The Project Linda prototype also has roughly 200 gigabytes of extra space so you can store more stuff. Ports-wise, you have a USBC port and a headphone jack on one side, a full-sized USB type A port on the other side.

So, you can plug in any, basically, any peripheral that's supported by an Android phone. So, flash drives, mice, keyboards, et cetera, and there's a headphone jack, which is always nice. There's no speakers on the device because it takes advantage of the front-facing speakers on the Razer phone itself, which is a clever repurposing, and instead of using the camera though, there is a webcam and mic built into the top so that people aren't looking up your nose while you're having a Skype conversation. It's still unclear whether or not Razer will actually be bringing this to market. Razer has done a lot of prototypes at CES.

Some of them make it to market, some of them don't. Some of them end up informing other products that do make it to market. So, it's still in development, and there is no idea of knowing whether or not we'll actually see it make the final cut, but for now, it's a really interesting prototype to extend your phone, especially as phones become more powerful. The inside is a soft-touch coating. So, that doesn't damage the phone, and you can kind of see how it works.

Just really, really cool and really fun to play with.

Source : The Verge