So I’m about to start some long term travelling so I’ve been looking to shrink down my setup as small as possible. The plan is to use some Viture AR glasses for the monitor, a ProtoArc folding keyboard, a Swiftpoint Propoint mouse and then either a Pixel 8 (my first choice if it’s got the rumoured desktop mode) or a Samsung Galaxy S22 with Dex, which will be housed in a QuadLock MAG case which allows you to swap magnetic battery packs on and off really easily. I can then keep the phone in my pocket or a bag with the AR glasses attached and then the peripherals connected over Bluetooth. I personally think this is going to be the best way of doing it because if you have a usb hub connected to the phone for a powerbank or accessories the cables start becoming a mess on your desk, especially as you’ve got one cable that moves about when you do. Depending on where I work I may end up getting a wireless external portable monitor like the Asus Zenscreen Go so I can take meetings because the phone screen might be a bit small and if I’m wearing glasses people might find it a bit jarring. I’d be using the phone as the webcam and get it to eye level using the Quadlock tripod. Another option would be to use a Samsung Galaxy Fold, but they’re crazy expensive and they also have some durability issues so I’m not keen. You also lose the advantage of the being able to use a quadlock and the swappable battery packs.

On the software side of things, I’m going to do all my dev work in containers via Codespaces/CodeCatalyst. Apparently someone has made a native android version of vscode now, if not there is the browser version. For gaming, I can use an 8bitdo SN30 Pro/razor kishi and Nvidia GeForce Now which in addition to the standard streaming library allows you to play games you’ve already purchased on Steam. I’m opting for taking two 8bitdos as well as a usb-c to hdmi cable in case I make any friends on the go I have a portable 2 player gaming setup that doesn’t take up much more space than a sunglasses case. If that doesn’t end up happening after a year or so I’ll ditch the 8bitdos and the cable and get a kishi for more convenient solo gaming. I was originally going to do this entire setup with a Steam Deck instead of an android but found it awkward to pack and it’s also not available worldwide so if something happened to my machine in say Australia, I wouldn’t easily be able to get another one without waiting a while and paying through the nose.

If there’s any specialist software I want to use, I’ll spin up a cloud instance for it using AWS/Azure, there’s a few options for this now:

- AWS workspaces and Azure Virtual Desktop if you want a GUI desktop experience in the browser.

- AWS Appstream and Azure RemoteApp if you want to stream just a single application.

- EC2 and Azure VMs if you’re no bothered about a GUI or you want to roll everything yourself.

I don’t expect to have to do this often as I reckon I can get by on mainly android apps. I use Obsidian for notes, there’s Adobe Premiere Rush for video editing etc.

If you want more examples, head over to the Samsung Dex subreddit. There’s quite a few people on there who have ditched their computers and have been using Dex for the last year.