What if your monitor could be plugged into your phone? What if you really didn’t need a laptop, since your phone’s CPU could power most applications, and draw data from the cloud?
That’s the premise of the “nirvana phone,” a reference design co-authored by virtualization giant Citrix and by the Open Kernel Labs to do just that.
Basically, the phone is less a phone and more of an I/O layer and hypervisor laid atop the existing phone operating system. The OK Labs technology uses Bluetooth to connect to a keyboard, and uses a wired connection to plug in an external display. The phone’s native applications then can be accessed via the larger display. Although the nirvana phone can connect via Bluetooth via a mouse, a nifty demonstration video (embedded after the jump) showed the phone’s touchscreen actually serving as a trackpad.
If this sounds familiar, then you’re right, sort of.
