Despite my last post, I got frustrated enough with my smartphone usage recently that as of today I'm using a flip phone. We'll see how long this lasts but so far I'm actually enjoying it.
But a sort of follow-up on my recent post, I suppose. I'm both a smartphone addict (which has me interested in using my phone less) and interested in convergence (which has me interested in using my phone more, in a sense). This feels like they would be in conflict, but I think there's actually a way in which it might not. This is such a specific and niche idea that I don't know if it actually appeals to anyone but me, but...
On a Linux phone, I think it might be possible to use multiseat sessions to simultaneously run both a mobile-focused environment on the phone screen/keypad (like bananui), and a separate fully-fledged desktop environment on an external display. On the go, you'd have a basic flip phone. Plug it into a dock, and you have a desktop computer!
You probably don't want the desktop environment and everything running on it to keep running/stay resident in RAM when undocked, which got me thinking about options to deal with that. To make sure things don't eat up CPU time unnecessarily, you could use cgroups to suspend all the processes related to the desktop side of things. If the phone has enough RAM and you carve out some for the desktop, that might be fine.
But if we want to get really crazy... I just ran across CRIU, which allows you to checkpoint running processes to disk and restore them later. It seems like checkpointing graphical applications currently isn't possible, but maybe someday? Or as a more heavyweight option, run a VM for the desktop session and suspend it to disk when unplugged? There's at least some precedent for doing that on mobile phones.
The kind of hardware that you'd need to actually do this is so absurdly specific that it probably doesn't exist. You need a flip phone capable of docking via DisplayPort Alt-Mode, and an absurdly overpowered processor and overprovisioned RAM for what a flip phone normally needs. Has anyone made something like this? I have no clue.
Impractical? Probably. Fun? I think so. :)