The death of the Lapdock: The post-PC future that won’t be

In spring 2011, the Motorola Mobility Lapdock gave a face to the post-PC notion that mobile computing would simply become computing, replacing for many the traditional PC and laptop with something new. It was a “have your cake and eat it, too” product: a dumb laptop into which you plugged the Atrix 4G Android smartphone for access to a large screen, full keyboard, trackpad, and — perhaps most important at the time — a destop-quality Web browser. Unlike with the Chromebook unveiled by Google around the same time, you didn’t lose the ability to run apps locally. You could in fact run Android apps and access the Internet and its cloud services such as Google Docs at the same time via the Lapdock.

In the year that has followed, the Lapdock faltered, with Motorola going through several iterations that first shrunk it too small and then grew it too large. The most recent hardware also felt cheap, and the price seemed high for what you got. The original Lapdock had many limitations, but it charted a course that was very compelling in those early days of tablets. Unfortunately, it got stuck early on in a muddled track.

[ Hands-on with the first generation of post-PC devices: the Lapdock, Chromebook, and iPad. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]

The Lapdock is now essentially dead. The new Motorola Atrix HD smartphone revealed yesterday doesn’t support the Lapdock or the WebTop software that tied it and Android together. Motorola isn’t saying that the Lapdock is dead (nor that it is alive), but of course it is dead. The Atrix 4G ushered in the Lapdock, and the Atrix HD is ushering it out.

The Lapdock as currently designed deserves to die, but the concept is still valid. And we may not need a Lapdock-style device to get that future.

For example, in the meantime, Apple has significantly improved the Safari Web browser, making it the most compatible of all mobile browsers with the desktop experience. It’s not there yet, but each version of iOS gets us much closer. And Bluetooth keyboards’ ubiquity, coupled with the ability to connect to a VGA, DVI, or HDMI monitor, means most people can turn it into a PC when needed. (Ironically, there are as yet no DisplayPort adapters to connect an iPad to Apple’s flagship Thunderbolt Display monitor.) Also, iOS’s built-in mirroring lets you make the connection without a cable — as long as you have an Apple TV, of course.

An evolved iPad is pushing in the direction of the post-PC computer that the Lapdock signified. Android tablets are not as advanced in either their Web browser compatibility or their ability to connect to external displays, but that platform is following Apple’s lead and will probably get there one day. It’s also savvier about alternative pointing devices, which iOS ignores.

Then there’s Chrome OS, Google’s Web-only computing environment that shipped to very poor sales in the form of the Chromebook laptop. That version of the post-PC vision has failed because it doesn’t let you work locally or use rich apps that so far cloud services do not deliver. Google keeps promising that local editing is coming soon (it’s been in beta for more than a year), and it may actually occur some day.

Motorola could continue to work on the Lapdock concept to find the right mix of capability and form, but Google’s recent acquisition of Motorola all but ensured that would never happen. The Lapdock vision conflicts with Google’s Chrome OS vision of cloud-only computing, though it fit in Google’s Android vision of broad mobile computing. (It’s always been clear that the Chrome OS and Android teams have nothing to do with each other, which is why their visions differ.)

Plus, the Lapdock uses Mozilla’s Firefox browser running on the Moonlight open source version of Microsoft’s Silverlight rich Internet application environment. Google is heavily staked to its Chrome browser, so a Firefox-based product could not survive. (Never mind Google’s claims it will run Motorola as an independent company. That’s as believable as Facebook saying it will guard your privacy. Google bought Motorola to use it, not merely own it.) Moonlight is dead, and Silverlight is fading. Even if Motorola wants to continue the Lapdock, it would have to start over — and I can’t imagine Google’s management allowing that given its large investment in Chrome OS.

If the Lapdock returns one day, it could be as a Chromebook or Chromebox device that lets you dock an Android smartphone to it directly or via short-range radio. In a sense, Apple does that for iOS devices via iTunes, but it’s too restrictive a connection. Google could do a more open approach, letting the two devices federate. But only if the Chrome OS and Android teams see that their two visions could overlap nicely into a version of that original post-PC vision. The fact that Google recently bought Quickoffice to provide a local client to its mobile-impaired Google Docs cloud service sugggests that maybe Google’s various groups are learning to collaborate.

I hope Google tries to reinvent the Lapdock concept using its Android and Chrome arsenals, as that would provide a real alternative to the merged OS X/iOS vision that Apple has been delivering on. Choice is good.

This article, “The death of the Lapdock: The post-PC future that won’t be,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.