Lapdock 500 questions

[dysfunkshun]

I was looking at picking up a lapdock 500 to use with my razr, but had a couple questions to ask before i make the leap.
First off, i was gonna sell my samsung laptop since i dont use it very much, mainly just to store music and to fix my phone when i do something dumb and bork it. Can i use the lapdock the same way? I was gonna buy an external hard drive to store all my music and fxz fixes, can the lapdocj run rsd and such? Or does it only run the stuff on my phone? Im kinda just looking for ways to save some money and selling my laptop would make a few bucks, but i dont want to screw myself and not be able to fix my phone the next time. Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[HerosTheLame]

I would like to know if the lapdock works with custom roms and an external hard disk. I don't have any plans of selling my computer but having this dock would be handy for work and other functions.

 

[TexasSilhouette]

I was looking at picking up a lapdock 500 to use with my razr, but had a couple questions to ask before i make the leap.
First off, i was gonna sell my samsung laptop since i dont use it very much, mainly just to store music and to fix my phone when i do something dumb and bork it. Can i use the lapdock the same way? I was gonna buy an external hard drive to store all my music and fxz fixes, can the lapdocj run rsd and such? Or does it only run the stuff on my phone? Im kinda just looking for ways to save some money and selling my laptop would make a few bucks, but i dont want to screw myself and not be able to fix my phone the next time. Thanks in advance for your help!

Don't sell your laptop, the lapdock is NOT a laptop replacement but rather an extension of your phone. Think of it as an extended battery, Keyboard, External display and some expansion ports for your phone. The engine per se' is still your phone.
Email, text, call (not tried this yet) with a regular keyboard and a trackpad or external mouse.
It has an SD Card slot (full sized) and two USB ports. I plugged an 8Gb Thumb drive into the back USB slot and the phone recognized a new storage device to copy to/from so I suspect an external HDD would be recognized the same way. I'll try it at some point.
I love my Droid 4, I believe it to be the best phone available to date. With the Lapdock as an extension of that phone the combination is unbeatable but it is STILL A PHONE.

Don't expect the lapdock to be faster than your phone, it IS your phone. Updating FB, Text, Chat, email, etc,.. all the same as your phone but with the advantage of a bigger screen, longer battery life, keyboard, external mouse, bigger speakers (sound pretty good actually).

 

[xmiinc]

Yay! Another D4 user with a Lapdock! <winks TexasSilhouette> [I have both the 100 and 500, I dig the concept THAT much] Yes, the lapdock can be seen as an extension of the phone rather than a replacement for a laptop. But...to the extent the lapdock does much of what a non-media-production laptop does, I personally DO consider it an alternative to a laptop. Because I am in media-production with a desktop, with enough experience to know how vulnerable that machine is because it has an internet connection, I've always been on the lookout for something that would allow me to disconnect it from exposure to the WAN (the internet) while keeping it on the LAN. That's done easily enough with a properly config'd router, but...what do I use for the internet and to browse the web in its place? I always saw the smartphone as having this potential, but the phones didn't have enough horsepower to make that a viable option on a regular basis, and even if it did, I couldn't see myself scratching on a 2x4 inch piece of glass for everything I wasn't using my media-desktop for. I could simply buy a laptop, but that would be yet another piece of gear to be managed with app and OS updates...a prospect I wasn't thrilled with since I was spending enough time already with my gear. Then I got my Droid 4 (from a Droid 2...close, but no cigar) and realized that--from a horsepower perspective--this was approaching my minimum requirements for an 'internet machine'. Then I stumbled across--first the Lapdock 100--and was very intrigued by the possibilities about finally implementing my strategy. But I was torn, I loved the form-factor of the 100, but decided that any internet machine needed to have a webcam capability. That just wasn't gonna happen with the Lapdock 100, so I reluctantly went for the 500 which has a built-in webcam (works great, btw). I didn't have that 500 more than 24 hours before I went and got the 100 as well, for a more mobile experience. So, depending on what you'd use a laptop for, it can indeed replace your laptop--including storage. And since your phone is the brain, any customizing you do that doesn't affect the Webtop app should be fine when attached to the Lapdock. Now, when I carry my Droid 4 around in my pocket, I think of it less as a phone and more as 'the brain' for my internet activities.