Those who have a use for tablets know the benefits of having one: a portable, focused, and personal. It’s a passive entertainment and communication device that you can take anywhere you want to do the simple things that most people care about: e-mail, browsing, reading, and perhaps watching some TV and movies.

But when we decide to get off of our asses and do something productive with our lives, writing that resume or great American novel on a touch screen is a ridiculous prospect. While a laptop is the most ideal solution, having the option to purchase a cheaper add-on keyboard–whether it be the Transformer dock or a portable bluetooth add-on–is great.

Being able to type on a device this portable and speedy, with a classic and compact clamshell design, is great.

In the Transformer’s particular case, though, having an actual dock that lets you close the two devices in a clamshell form factor–while barely adding any weight–is more portable in a certain respect. You don’t have two disconnected pieces hanging out sad and alone in their own corners. Closing the thing and picking it up is less clumsy than dealing with those disparate pieces, and the extra battery and storage is such an added value.

My experience has been great, but if there’s one thing that I regret about it, it’s that this whole affair has reminded me of just how much I yearn for the convertible gaming laptop-tablet hybrid to become a reality, and it’s shown me just how far away these tablet-first devices are from that.

A little history: When the iPad was first shown, I scoffed. What I wanted was a touch-screen device that could do everything that I would want a laptop for. The old Windows touchscreen tablets were a joke, and while the iPad had Apple’s mastery of design behind it, it still wasn’t what I wanted. I fell into the tablet landscape almost completely by accident when I decided that reading Kindle books on the small screen provided by my phone wasn’t such a fun experience. Why not just go the whole way and get something that could browse the web and display YouTube clips too, while I was at it? (A self-imposed $300-or-less spend on this market eliminated any Apple products or super high-end Android products–hence my old 7″ Iconia A100 tablet, now sold, and currently the TF300T.)

Now a tablet user of 16 months, have my views changed? Not so much. I do like what these types of devices offer from an accessibility standpoint, where prior to this I didn’t have much of a desire for it. Yet, it’s still not exactly what I want it to be–a device I can travel with that allows me to: edit the same Photoshop document I was working on at home; pick up a Steam game from where I last left it from my room; continue editing an episode of the podcast that I started from my desk; and yet still do all the things that we love tablets for.

In the Transformer’s case, its dock has bridged a large part of the gap in that at least I can work on documents mouse-and-keyboard style, and some of the games that interest me are coming out on the Android ecosystem (namely, Swords & Sorcery EP and other novel indie titles). But I recently tried spending a night with it as my only device and I almost went through multitasking withdrawal, pining for the ability to keep Audacity, Netflix and Gmail windows open at the same time, and unhappy with the fact that I could not open Photoshop to progress on a poster I’ve been working on. And forget, for a second, that I am so well-equipped with games that I am never at a loss for something to play–at the moment, I’m working on Torchlight II as the game of the moment. Last time I checked, I couldn’t open Steam on my tablet to boot that up. Bummer.

Tablets are great for what they’re focused on doing, but I still need a good laptop in my life. It’s why I still bothered buying my current Lenovo, whose GeForce GTX600M is fantastic at playing the same games I enjoy on my PC, and why I tote both devices with me when I’m on the road for work. (After all, a tablet and Pocket articles combine for a powerful bedtime story tool. Sidenote: Before my first tablet, I tried reading a Kindle book in bed with my laptop resting on my stomach. Not a comfortable experience.)

I still want, and need, a multi-tasking, multi-Window, portable computing solution.

Products like HP’s Envy X2 are along the lines of what I’m after. It’s equipped with a full version of Windows 8 (not the crippled RT iteration) and it still splits off from its base to satisfy the tablet/e-reader form factor. Razer’s just-announced Edge product almost amazes me, too–it’s perhaps the most powerful convertible on the market, sporting discrete graphics and undoubtedly the closest to exactly what I want. And out of sheer curiosity, I’m itching to see what Microsoft’s Surface Pro has to offer.

But now that we’re so close to my portable dream machine, there are the little details that we have to worry about–and ALL of the checkboxes must be marked. Is overall performance a priority, as opposed to being sacrificed for ultra-portability? Can it play intense PC games at its screen’s native resolution without requiring me to strip off all of the high quality effects? Does it have enough high-bandwidth ports like USB 3.0 to satisfy any external drives I might want (I still watch Blu-Ray video on the road)? Can I connect it to my television via some form of HDMI, without paying an arm and a leg for a dock or converter? (That last one is the one thing that irks me about the Edge.)

The good news for me is that I’m no longer so adverse to being a three-tier consumer, thanks to more affordable Android products showing me the brighter side of the tablet form factor (and Apple’s great refurbished-products program for lower prices makes the iPad slightly more appealing to me), and the keyboard dock works great for typing something in a pinch. But when the day comes that a full-featured laptop with gaming performance and an optical drive–the kind that I prefer–also allows me to pop off its screen for some good ol’ Kindle reading, I’ll be more than happy to ditch the  third device tier entirely

Now, Ice Cream Sandwich has been running quite nicely for those who took the risk–whether it be via a custom ROM or an unofficial, leaked Motorola Release not yet approved by Verizon. But this is still behind Android’s current best and brightest, Jelly Bean. Very few devices have been updated to Jelly Bean by their carriers, so unless you’re rocking Google’s Galaxy Nexus phone or Nexus 7 tablet, you most likely won’t get it without help from the development community. The same goes for the Droid Bionic, but the funny thing about the Bionic’s situation is the fact that we don’t even have an official Ice Cream Sandwich build yet. So, for those of you paying attention to the title of this post, you’ll understand the minor nuttiness here.

Two famed Android developers, who go by the handles of DHacker and Hashcode, are responsible for bringing to the Bionic a port of Cyanogenmod 10, itself a custom ROM from a long-running series of excellent custom ROMs for Android devices. (You won’t find “official” Cyanogenmod ROMs for the Bionic anywhere–all instances of Cyanogenmod for the Bionic are ports done by other developers, given the locked bootloader problem alluded to in last week’s post.) While the alpha build has been floating around the development community for a few weeks now, only as of Monday did the duo get 3G/4G data working consistently, right from boot-up without any finagling (I was never able to get it to work before). They also managed to get camera functionality up and running, though you’ll need to use a 3rd party app for that (many community members swear by Camera 360 Ultimate; I think it’s pretty good as well) and movies need to be shot at a low resolution for the time being. But the inclusion of photos and data is enough to put even a ROM in alpha state over the “daily driver” jump (meaning that they’d be willing to use it on a daily basis).

Most other phone functionality works, but among the things that still need kinks worked out are bluetooth connectivity, HDMI connectivity and getting the stock camera to work. You also won’t get Webtop with this, so if you’re using a Motorola Lapdock, you won’t be able to use it if you flash this ROM.

Expanding a notification

I’ve been using Jelly Bean on my tablet for a few weeks already, and I was very excited to have it on my phone as well. On the web you can find several in-depth looks into what Jelly Bean has to offer, both from a bells-and-whistles standpoint and a subtle functionality standpoint. One of the subtle things that I’ve found makes my usage much snappier is the ability to expand an email notification to show you the first few lines of the email that comes in. It’s a trivial thing up-front, but I notice that I use it a lot, and I’m able to glean messages much quicker than if I were to open the message in Gmail and scroll through it. Project Butter is great, and although I previously used launchers and hacks to speed up the behavior of my phone’s interface on Ice Cream Sandwich, it’s nice to know that you’ll get a smooth UI experience without having to tweak anything.

If you want to take the plunge, you’ll want to follow the universal Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade guide written by XDA member crobs808 here. Then, when you get to the “Optional” section, for downloading the ROM in step A you’ll want to grab the CM10 Alpha Build here.

I was mildly interested in the concept and technology for my Droid Bionic, but a combination of the price and lukewarm reception to the so-so performance of the OS running on the lapdock deterred me from doing anything more than admiring it from afar.

Almost a year later, Motorola–now known as Motorola Mobility (thanks to its new owners, Google)–is changing its strategy as a company and potentially shelving the webtop feature. A quick dive into the XDA Developers forum revealed that, since its inception, Webtop–now version 3.0–had changed from a barebones Linux OS with old, pokey Firefox 4 running as its default browser to a tabletized, high-res version of Ice Cream Sandwich… provided that your device ran Ice Cream Sandwich in the first place. Another quick dive into eBay showed that new Lapdocks were being sold for as little as $70.

One more dive, this time into my wallet. Admittedly, I wasn’t entirely sober at the moment, but in the name of morbid curiosity and geekery, I decided to jump on one for my Bionic, which in fact running a leaked Motorola build of Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Hardware

The Lapdock for Bionic seems exciting when you pull it out of the box. It’s barely longer and wider than a letter-sized sheet of paper, and certainly thin enough to qualify as smaller than ultrabook size. I travel out of town 50% of the time for work, so I found appealing the thought of taking this with me and keeping it as a dedicated blogging, emailing and browsing machine while I left my main work laptop locked in my desk at the office. Light-as-a-feather laptop? Check. Even when in the office, I could plug my phone in and instant-message with my friends and family, since the office blocks AIM and gChat, among others, and I hate using virtual keyboards or Swype heavily. Circumventing office productivity measures without abandoning my touch-type ways? Double-check.

Open it up and start playing with it, though, and the bad news sets in. Initially, the keys feel nice and punchy. But once you actually try typing out a sentence, the space bar is unresponsive unless you hit it in the right spots or with extra force. Avoidingsentenceslikethese is a major chore. The trackpad’s mouse buttons are a bit squishy, and while they’re not as bothersome as the space bar, they could stand to be quite a bit more responsive. The space bar is the more egregious problem–throwing in a travel mouse to mitigate the mouse-button issue is not much of a hassle and a pretty standard practice with laptops in general, but packing in a separate keyboard, too? Eh, no thanks.

The OS

Before I talk about the Webtop OS itself, please bear in mind: If you are still running Gingerbread on your phone, your experience will be completely different as Webtop on that OS is a barebones Ubuntu instance with Firefox 4. As I mentioned before, I tested this using Ice Cream Sandwich. (And if you’re still using a Bionic with Gingerbread, consider updating to one of the Ice Cream Sandwich leaks. It’ll breathe new life into your phone, and you don’t even need to root it.)

With that out of the way…

Once you hook your phone into your lapdock, the screen will… amble for a second… and then light up with one of those typical “welcome” messages. Click past that and you’ll be in a high-res, tablet UI version of Ice Cream Sandwich. Meaning, your Back-Home-Recents buttons will be on the lower left-hand corner, and your clock and notifications will appear on the lower right-hand corner. All of your apps are present, and you have access to all of your files with whatever file manager you have installed. In short, you are seeing everything on your phone as you would normally–only in landscape, tablet mode, and high resolution.

To me, this is a good thing. You don’t have to adapt to a new operating environment or feel like you don’t get full access to your apps. With a Gingerbread phone, running them in a window to the side may be adequate, but is that really what you wanted? Probably not. What if you wanted to play Final Fantasy, which only plays in landscape? Unless you can rotate that window, you’d have to turn your head to the side… or lay the lapdock on its side. (And if you’re using Webtop through a TV, um, good luck.)

Certainly there are caveats. The Gingerbread iteration’s Firefox browser came with Flash support. That’s one area you might be lacking here, because several users have reported trouble getting Flash to work with their Bionics on the Ice Cream Sandwich leaks–myself included. (Browsing in iPad mode should alleviate most, not all, concerns.) Amazon Instant Video might be unusable since there is no native Android app, but I’m happy to report that the Netflix app works just fine. Unfortunately I got grainy video, even when attached to my home Wi-Fi network, but it’s satisfactory enough in a pinch.

With only a mouse pointer to navigate with, you won’t be able to use pinch-to-zoom or any other multi-touch functionality. Using CTRL+mousewheel up or down doesn’t work either. This generally isn’t an issue with websites, though, since the screen is large enough (both physically and from a resolution standpoint) that you’ll rarely find yourself needing to zoom in or out.

But even forgetting about multi-touch, since Android was designed as a touch-UI platform, it feels awkward mousing through the environment. Swiping left and right to access your various homescreens feels chunky with a mouse: Click, hold, fling left or right, release. Sometimes you haven’t flung quite far enough, and so the screen begins to transition, but then bounces back into place. Similar quirks happen for pretty much any swiping behavior, like removing tasks from your Recents menu.

Also, because I’m so mentally tied to normal mouse operation when a trackpad or mouse becomes available to me, I found myself trying to click-and-drag to highlight words. Android doesn’t work that way. I had to re-train myself to click and hold on a single word, wait for the word-highlight pincers to appear, and then drag those left and right to highlight. Awkward. But not impossible.

Performance

If only the lapdock performed as zippily as an undocked ICS Bionic does. Right away you’ll notice a slight amount of mouselag, more with the trackpad than with a USB mouse. This already does not bode well, especially given the cognitive oddities noted above when trying to mouse through a touch-based UI.

Furthermore, apps lag when you open them. Pages seemed to stall when loading while using Chrome. Bringing up the Recents menu felt pokey, as well. Animations hitched more frequently than I was used to for the ICS leak (which is almost to say that they hitched at all, period).

The real killer, though, was trying to use Office apps. I tested with QuickOffice and OfficeSuite 6. Both apps lagged, with the former being more problematic than the latter. As I typed long strings of text, there would be a delay of at least several milliseconds that continued to grow as the sentence I was typing became longer and longer. It was normal to see the display spit out my last two or so words after I completely stopped typing. Not all is lost: Gmail, Google Docs and the WordPress Apps seemed to exhibit none of these issues. But it’s still a disheartening thing to see. Perhaps it’s the fault of the apps, and not the lapdock?

On a hunch, I used SetCPU to set the minimum CPU frequency of my phone to 1GHz (which is also the fastest, unless you somehow happen to be running a kernel or custom ROM that allows you to overclock). This did not help much except for apps opening up at a slightly speedier clip and the Recents menu being more a touch more responsive. The Office apps saw zero benefit. Stick to Google Docs, though, and I suspect you’ll be okay.

Battery life, on the other hand, won’t be an issue. The lapdock doesn’t just sap your phone’s juice–it actually augments total battery life with its own battery. Reviews report 8 hours of battery life. I had it on for a few hours unplugged using it for a few minutes at a time, with the screen going to sleep after a minute of inactivity, and never saw the battery meter shrink.

What’s the Use Case?

If you’re in an office environment whose wired and wireless LAN blocks things you’d like to have, such as personal email, instant messaging, or certain sites that you probably shouldn’t be visiting at work anyway if you care at all about being productive (such as, ahem, this one), having this thing around is handy.

It’s also decent if you want something lightweight to take with you to a coffee shop to write that great screenplay you’ve had bouncing around your noggin, and your local venue doesn’t provide Wi-Fi for free. You’d have to stay on Google Docs and avoid the two Office Apps mentioned above, of course.

I doubt you’d get any serious gaming out of this. I’m not sure what drivers are supported but I was unable to get my USB Logitech RumblePad 2 to work at all. Would something like Dead Trigger work with the mouse and keyboard? Forum posts I’m reading seem to indicate a big fat “no”. But you might be able to run Max Payne off of a wired Xbox 360 controller. (It worked for the Nexus 7.) I’m also concerned about the performance of the lapdock–getting an intense 3D game like Dead Trigger to run smoothly at all would be a challenge. I even got performance hitches just testing out Final Fantasy. But that may be a tale for another day, since there are issues with that port to begin with.

So it’s good for lightweight computing. Here’s the thing: tablets and ultrabooks already exist for lightweight computing, too. Where does this leave something like the lapdock?

If you think about it, tablets and ultrabooks themselves form this weird two-layered middle-ground between smartphones and traditional laptops. This lapdock seems to be occupying that tiny wedge of space–the middle-ground of the middle-grounds, if you will. It doesn’t perform as smoothly as an iPad, the top Android tablets, or even the phone that plugs into it, and certainly nowhere near the ultrabooks it seems to most emulate. And its future is uncertain–we don’t even know if Motorola will support it past today.

The only endorsement I can give it is that if you already own a Motorola phone that supports it, you could end up paying under $100 for a 2 pound “laptop” that lets you email, browse and use Google Docs with a real keyboard. Even if it performs at a somewhat pokey clip, that’s an intriguing price. Less so if you already have either a top tablet and don’t give a rat’s ass about a real keyboard, or an ultrabook of at least average speed.

I’m one of these fools. I see something shinier and faster, and if I can’t get it I resign myself to pining hopelessly. So when the Samsung Galaxy SIII came out, normally I would have salivated and wished that my contract was up soon so I could switch.

See, I own a Motorola Droid Bionic, a phone that has been promised an update of its now-ancient Android 2.3 operating system (Gingerbread) to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), but time and time again, Verizon failed to deliver. It was promised at the outset of Q3 2012; it is now the beginning of Q4 2012. Some folks stopped believing it would ever come. The writing, it seems, should be on the wall: with my upgrade eligibility over a year away, I’d throw up my hands and just drop the cash on the shiny, new, and un-subsidized phone.

I like to think, though, that I saved my phone–gave it another full year at least–by doing what many tech-savvy Android phone owners (something I am not) resort to doing: flashing a custom ROM.

A quick dumb-down primer for those as dim-witted as me: A custom ROM is what folks commonly call firmware or operating systems which have been modified by development communities from their “official” versions, generally for mobile devices like phones and tablets. (I’ve never heard the term applied to something like a personalized Linux variant for a computer, but I suppose the analogy holds.) The Android operating system, in particular, is left open source by owner Google, who is perfectly happy to let developers and phone OEMs craft their own variants of the OS (within certain standards, depending on the situation… it gets a little complex here and I won’t go into it).

Initially, I just wanted to upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich just so that I could be running at what’s supposed to be the current standard of the platform. (Technically, it’s actually supposed to be Version 4.1, Jellybean, but that has not yet seen wide official proliferation–even on new devices.) What I ended up with was a phone that was actually much speedier and had better battery life than before, with zero changes to its physical hardware. (There are quite a few ROMs out there that do this, but the one in particular that runs on my phone comes courtesy of a development group called Team Liquid: Liquid ICS 1.5, Revision 1.)

The road to the ROM wasn’t straightforward–not for regular joes like me, and not for Team Liquid and others who were developing their own ROMs for the Bionic. You can read the history of the ICS update woes here. Some intrepid followers found official builds from Motorola and soon Ice Cream Sandwich updates–each one progressively more stable–were unofficially leaked across the web. Had it not been for this, the development community may not have ever been able to build stable ROMs for the device because all of Motorola’s devices come with locked bootloaders. Thanks to the leaked Motorola builds, the developers at least had some base to work off of that would allow them to boot the phones into Ice Cream Sandwich. The hardest part was done.

A sidenote: To date, we have at least eight iterations of the Ice Cream Sandwich leak for the Bionic. Certain folks on the XDA Developers forum say the scuttlebutt is that Verizon continues to reject each successive release because Motorola has been unable to get Flash working in Ice Cream Sandwich.

It’s not hard to see that it would have been a painful waiting game. At some point, if you wanted just to stay current (Gingerbread just wasn’t cutting it), you’d have to jump if you wanted to avoid buying a whole new phone.

After going through the steps to reset my phone to factory standards and then update to one of the leaked ICS builds, I tried it out. It went well–the phone was smoother both in operation and the user experience. It wasn’t silky smooth like newer phones, but it sufficed, and at least my phone was more current.

But the tutorial I read made a recommendation on the ROM from Team Liquid, who was focused on making their ROMs’ performance “liquid smooth”. It also mentioned that I could use the new Google Now features without needing Jelly Bean (which is in development by the community but doesn’t yet have a build with stable cellular data connectivity).

After following the steps and installing the Liquid ROM, I find that my phone runs very fast compared to what it did on one of the later stable Motorola Ice Cream Sandwich leaks, and Gingerbread feels like a choppy user experience by comparison. Transitions and their animations are faster, and often smoother. App loading and task switching are much brisker. Using pinch-to-zoom on photos and web sites is very smooth, almost (though not quite) as smooth as what I’ve seen Jelly Bean can do.

Is there still a reason to crave Jelly Bean? Sure. There are slight interface and usability improvements that Jelly Bean implements over Ice Cream Sandwich as well as some background tinkering. But for the time being, due to the increased speed I’m experiencing and the addition of Google Now, I almost feel as if I have an entirely new phone–Jelly Bean or not.

To tell you the truth, I feel almost angry that for so long, Bionic owners like me have been holding a decently powerful piece of hardware without an operating system to take advantage of it. No, the Bionic won’t trounce the Galaxy SIII or even its contemporaries in the Droid Razr or Droid Razr Maxx, even with a fast custom ROM, but it’s certainly speedy enough that you most likely won’t care.

(Sidenote: I bought the Bionic after it had been out for a short while, just as Motorola announced the Droid Razr. Despite the faster processing power in the newer phone, it has no removable battery. That’s a key factor for me. I recently bought the extended battery on sale, and even with 4G connectivity my phone can last two days before needing a recharge. Plus it’s easier to kill and reboot the phone with a battery pull if it freezes for whatever reason.)

Potentially voiding your device’s warranty and facing the possibility of rendering it inoperable are surely reasons to be scared of turning to the development commmunity (hint: if you follow directions, you have nothing to worry about). But sometimes when you’re dealing with a device that seems to be going unsupported and, worse, whose potential remains unlocked, it’s worth the risk of going down the underground path–especially when its OEM just had a press conference announcing a new line of phones whose budget $99 model packs better hardware that what you currently have. (In fairness, Motorola said that all 2011 devices would receive Jelly Bean updates… but with the caveat that they won’t update “some” devices and would instead issue a $100 rebate for you to spend on a new device.)

If you’re a Bionic owner, or otherwise own a pretty fast phone that has ceased to receive updates from its OEM and your carrier, you should consider taking the plunge. As long as you know where to look and can follow instructions to the letter, you might squeeze another year or two out of a phone that once made you feel as if you were left behind.