Did anyone here have one of those phones? Or the lapdock, by chance? I’m looking into lapdock options and x3 lapdock looks like really nice hardware, while being more compact than my current nexdock 2. But I’m not reading such good things about how it works with Dex. But it’s about half the price of upgrading to a nexdock 360, or the uperfect x. I’m wondering if anyone here had experience with that set up, or experience with the dock hardware.
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I still have my X3 tucked away in my graveyard drawer of abandoned tech. I was a sweet Windows 10 phone - that worked well on Verizon.
I never had the lap dock though.
Hadn’t come across this concept before: a lap dock specifically designed to be the keyboard / screen and trackpad accessory that would turn your phone / steam deck etc into a portable (and cheap) hot design / portable office solution.
I’ve just been handed my “portable office” corporate phone and laptop for work and the combo definitely does not feel small / portable in any way. It’s a pretty powerful phone and a pretty mundane and heavy HP laptop.
It makes a huge use case scenario for buying the very most powerful phone you can get each year / every two years while the much lighter lap dock is a longer term solution but neither Samsung nor Apple are really looking to step on their own laptop lines by making Dex or any Apple version of Dex work as well as they could.
Google won’t do it either as such a solution would step on Chromebook sales. Interesting concept though.
In my last job I used my Huawei Mate20X as my portable everywhere device and just left my laptop docked for almost every meeting I went to. The Mate20X had a decently sized screen and supported all of the apps that I used for work (primarily MS Office/Teams and Salesforce). There were times I wished I had a dockable option for my phone around the size of a Surface Go. The Mate20X had its own version of DEX that I tested on my monitor at home, and it worked fine for the most part. I looked into a NexDock, but just couldn’t justify the price for my limited use case.
I still think this is a really great option for a lot of use cases. Just having the cellular connectivity of your phone without having to turn on the hotspot, which is never as good is much more convenient at the expense of having to dock your phone into a shell. I feel like as phones get more and more advanced, this would be an amazing option to have, but I just don’t know about the marketability of it.
If Apple came out with a smallish iPhone that had the cellular and all the basic stuff, but could just drop into the chasis of say an 11’ IPP, which contained a bigger battery and a second processor/ram set up that switched it to iPadOS capabilities, people would go GaGa over it, because it’s Apple. That same phone could drop into a laptop shell and become dex-like if they ever actually improved stage manager. It would be like the base requirement for all the perfect accessories. Apple could make a killing on it and spur some interesting change in the market. Of course, it would be a major paradigm shift for them, redefining what an iPad and iPhone are. The Macbooks could still be the heavy lifters. Anyway, I got off track. Docks for phones are fun.
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The price of laptop style docks needs to fall to make them an impulse buy. Add to that any of the big manufacturers really putting the effort into the desktop mode (I think Samsung come closest but they also have most to lose in competing with their own laptops) and lots of people would try it.
I could see buying something like that for my daughter and her schoolwork more than buying her a chromebook. Making fun more of the concept would also help convince buyers too.
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For sure. I mainly refer to the concept over the current application.
The main reason I asked about the elite x3 lapdock in the first place was that they can be had relatively cheaply at this point. I wasn’t quite wanting to invest nexdock 360 money when I have a perfectly good nexdock 2. So I picked up a Lenovo Thinkpad yoga 260 for less than half the price of the nexdock 360. I have the touchscreen, yoga hinge, plus a pen and the capability of running windows with socketed ram and ssd. I’m typing this from Dex on windows on the yoga 260. So now, I have all the compute power of my zfold 3, the direct 5G data connection (not using limitted tethering data), plus the full fat windows stuff when I need that too. I picked up a 16GB RAM stick, plus a 1TB SSD, and I’m still coming in under the price of the nexdock 360.
The Thinkpad is Thinkpad quality, including the wonderful keyboard. Even though the warranty is long gone, the aftermarket support is a wealth of internet tear down videos and user serviceable parts. My only complaints would be the ridiculous bezels and lack of USB-C. It at least has USB 3.0, so I also got some adapters for my good USB-C cables.
I jumped on this because it was available locally, but a 370 might be even better for the bigger screen in the same size box and thunderbolt port. But, the 260 is lighter than my nexdock 2, and the 370 would be heavier. So of course, now I’m wondering if I can somehow fit a 370 screen into the 260 lid.
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Sorry for derailing the thread! 
The idea of a small portable hard drive that I could attach to a high quality screen and keyboard at various sizes has always appealed to me and the Nexdock seems to open the door to that future.
Always make sure you are entering the sim tray back into the phone in correct orientation.
I used the X3 for a few months, as I was “between work phones” and the very day I got a new work phone I took the sim card out and put the tray back incorrectly.
It will get stuck. There was no way to remove it, phone was as good as dead then. Well, maybe huge brute force but that would have broken the sim card reader anyways.
Somehow I managed to find myself on ebay again and I found a good deal on one, so it’s on the way.
I was kind of watching the uperfect x mini, but they quietly starting shipping it, and it’s not looking good. So that one’s out.
The Thinkpad has taken over linux duties. I couldn’t get a dual boot set up because of the way windows had installed itself on the bigger ssd, so I blew it away and put Ubuntu and Mint on it. That showed me how much I rely on Dex and OneNote on windows, so windows is reinstalling now. I guess I’m just not happy unless I have something to mess with.
Sent from my nexdock.
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It’s here and I’m typing on it. It’s just like all the reviews said, the hardware is great, but it’s wonky with Dex. Almost makes me want to get the phone so I can try continuum.
Once I get a good connection, it is really nice. The keyboard is great, the screen is great, the footprint is compact. The touchpad is junk and clicking is sketchy. Click and drag is almost impossible. But reports are that it works better with the fold 4, so I’m hoping it’s a software thing that will improve whenever the update comes to the fold 3. My tab S7+ already got the update, so that’ll be my next thing to try.
It also does wireless connection, but only the display works, no touchpad and keyboard when connected wirelessly. Sound does not work and I lose the option to have sound come from my phone when plugged in. I think there were some workarounds on reddit that I need to read more about.
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