from Hacker News

New Asus 'gaming' phone has more USB ports than 13“ Macbook Pro

by bmpafa on 6/5/18, 11:22 PM with 17 comments

• by IronWolve on 6/5/18, 11:28 PM

  And exposes a common flaw in phones, cant run at full speed without throttling due to heat. It has to have a fan to be used at its advertised available performance.

  If I buy a car, and expect to do the speed limit on the highway, but it will only do the speed limit for a few minutes, then needs to slow down due to heat, that sounds like fraud.

• by chendragon on 6/6/18, 7:46 AM

  I wonder if they will provide an option to run Linux when it's plugged into the display. It seems like they're giving it quite the bandwidth to drive a 4K display and fast charge power through the multiple connectors, so it would be nice to see the ability to have this to use as a portable development machine.

  At least this is the main selling point for me, coming from iPhone I really do want one to see about doing that on. Of course, being Android/ARM, the kernel might not be the friendliest of all things to be running for development and it might not be updated after a few years. I could imagine that some development would be needed to make the transition from dock to phone more smooth, but I think they could make it work.

  I do quite like the attention paid to thermals and power in this device, the 20W power supply surely solves the 'drains when using and charging at the same time' issue unless they decide to throttle current draw when the screen is on like Samsung used(?) to? Seems like the fan might help, given that desktop workloads might push the processor hard.

• by TwoNineFive on 6/6/18, 6:55 AM

  There seems to be a lot of criticisms about this phone that I've seen on reddit, here, and elsewhere.

  Personally I would LOVE to have a phone with a USB c port on both sides of the chassis so that I could charge while using a USB-audio jack converter or doing something else with it. Multiple USB ports would offer functionality to people that has not previously been possible with these devices.

  I see this as a super innovative product in a market segment that is seeing stagnation. The customers are screaming for bigger batteris and instead we get thinner fragile phones made of glass. People want more jacks sdcard slots and other features, but OEMs are taking features away. All the while, prices are being jacked up, and triple junk cameras are being added.

  I think the smartphone market is ripe for a shakeup. If not from some real innovation, from the customer base just refusing to upgrade to more expensive fragile phones that don't offer the features they want at an outrageous price.

• by MatthiasP on 6/6/18, 6:59 AM

  Because it is marketed towards people who buy a spec sheet, not a user experience. Personally I love the fact that one single USB-C port + a decent dongle can replace lots of ports.

• by tonetheman on 6/5/18, 11:58 PM

  It also has the same amount of RAM. :)

• by charlesdm on 6/6/18, 1:02 AM

  I personally can't remember however when I cared about the amount of USB ports in my Mac.

• by flukus on 6/6/18, 12:56 AM

  Looks like they may as well have put a sim card in a Nintendo Switch cartridge and called that a phone.

  I can't see it gaining any adoption when all the add ons make it a worse phone, it's too bulky to carry around and probably unsupported by most developers.

  I'm pretty confident this will end up on top of the increasingly large pile of failed convergent devices, because convergence is a fundamentally flawed idea.

• by theshadowknows on 6/6/18, 3:04 AM

  Cool fake notch

• by mastrsushi on 6/6/18, 1:16 AM

  Ugly generic Android ((gaming)) phone has more USB ports than beautiful slimeline 13" Macbook Pro.

  𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐬 We have yet to find a use case for full sized USB ports on a phone. Hence why most OEMs would never do something so redundant to begin with.

  For anyone that really wants to plug their keyboard into their 5 inch phone, here's a solution https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GGKYYT0/ref=asc_df_B01GGKYYT055...