[Sony Xperia P, U, Sola, Go] sergiotech:
Hi all,

So with little trick I got it all working without any lapdock modification.

First I bought Micro HDMI Female - Micro HDMI Male cable on Ebay.

With this cable Lapdock works just like any TV or Monitor connected to Xperia wia HDMI.

Then Micro USB - Micro USB was a problem. Looks like there is no such cable on the market. So could not avoid some soldering. First idea was to "extend" internal micro USB by soldering external cable. But I didn't want to destroy Lapdock... so decided just to make custom extension Micro USB - Micro USB. Used some micro USB Male - normal USB cable on one side and micro USB Female taken from micro USB Female - Micro USB Female connector (lots of them on the market).

First attempts were not successful, it was working only as charger, so no OTG meaning Eperia could not understand it has to work as host. After some googling and wiki-ing understood, than in "normal" (non-OTG == device connected on micro USB side is slave)cables pin nr 4 is connected to pin nr 5 via 100 kOhm resistor. In OTG cable where device is always "Host" those pins (4 and 5) are simply shortened. This is better but with that I could not charge Xperia form lapdock even with lid closed.

So finally solution is to make "universal" OTG cable, by connecting all pins on one side to all same pins on another side. In that situation Lapdock automatically set itself as "slave" when lid opened, and "master" when lid closed.

And voila. Its all working. See photos.

Cables

View attachment 1124162

Phone connected

View attachment 1124167

How it is working

View attachment 1124168

Some good and bad experience.

Typing with lapdock keyboard is perfect.

Speed is perfect, actually no difference in speed comparing to phone, which is perfect I can say. Never noticed any performance problems.

Controlling Xperia from keyboard is mixed. Left-Right-Up-Down works nicely to scroll elements, move to next etc. Esc works like "back" but there is no button or combination for "Home" and "Settings" :(

Working with lapdock touchpad is fatal, to move pointer form left to right side of screen I need to move finger 5 times across touchpad.

Workign with external mouse instead of touchpad is good. Right button works as "Back", middle button works as "Home". Moving pointer is smooth and fast.

Battery... haven't tried to test fully. Can say that as "pair" 50/50 when lid is sometimes closed (Xperia charging) and sometimes opened (both works on their batteries) during 5 hours sony is on 70% and lapdock is on 3 "dots" (from 5). I hope with lid closed I can keep Xperia 24 hours working only on Lapdock battery (plus 10-12 hours of xperia battery self) .

Important, BOTH cables (HDMI and USB) has to be connected to charge and to work. Without HDMI connected Lapdock works just like a brick :) looks like it is switched on by HDMI signal only.

Screen. For movies, photos and in "tv" mode it is perfect. In those cases Xperia sends "special" hi definition signal (native for lapdock 1024x768). In normal mode, when it is just bigger phone screen it is bad. Really bad, no anti-aliasing, icons and text is rendered as target resolution is 640x480. Actually everything looks better on phone than on "big" screen. Strange, it is the same resolution and XS could do exactly the same work for second screen...

Other good things, devices connected to Lapdocs works good, I tried flash drives, HDD, several mouses, several external keyboards.

Hope most of "problems" will disappear with ICS. If not I will try to install the same stuff that is working on Atrix - Ubuntu running in virtual machine specially to send signal to Lapdock.