We had USB 3 with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 in September 2013. It is now almost a decade. If rumors are true, Samsung will announce a USB 4 (thunderbolt 3) phone before the end of 2024. I agree with the grandparent. While most people don't care too much for eGPU (?), I'm sure if we let people innovate, good things will come.
My dream is much smaller.
I just want whatever hardware circuitry is required to accomplish the scenario where a phone that is plugged in to a good power source runs directly from the wall, shutting off battery charge completely, not trickle charging all day and night.
I have an M1 Macbook Air which will only output video over one of its 2 USB-C ports, not the other. There is nothing visible on the case or in the OS to indicate this.
I have had an Arm and an AMD Thinkpad which both have only dual USB-C, and both unpredictably switch between one or the other being bootable, with no discenable pattern.
> I have an M1 Macbook Air which will only output video over one of its 2 USB-C ports, not the other.
Weird, ever since I had USB-C based Mac Mini or MacBook (two Intel, two M1) they could reliably output video on any of the two, three, or four ports (as long as I don't go past the limit). They're essentially symmetric on all features.
USB4 mandates 40GBps. It mandates DisplayPort. These would be pretty helpful baselines to expect, reasons for consumers to want USB4: they know it will be fairly featureful.
PCIe transport ("Thunderbolt") and Power Delivery are both optional though, I think.
My Lenovo Y700 does passthrough power. It also has a mode where it only starts charging if the battery is below 40% and it'll stop at 60%
Unfortunately its not a phone. Its a mini tablet. But I find the size ideal for daily use - browsing，reading pdfs, small sketches . (no SIM slot though)
My sample size isn't big, but on Linux every laptop I've seen has amazing battery reporting information galore. Oh sure battery level. And various assessments of wear. Things like realtime charge or discharge rates.
But more notably, I think around half also have charge control. It's just been on/off. But it would be a pretty basic bash script to make this happen.
I have a Huawei Mate book 16 and under KDE (Ubuntu) I can set a charge limit in the energy settings
But it depends on the laptop. From what I understand not all laptops have the drivers for power control ie. the ability to from-software tell the laptop to stop charging
Pretty sure most any phone already has the hardware for software defined charging. Android just doesn't have an API call for it, unless they do and I just haven't heard yet.
Maybe we should be filing feature requests for it;
My dream is much smaller. I just want whatever hardware circuitry is required to accomplish the scenario where a phone that is plugged in to a good power source runs directly from the wall, shutting off battery charge completely, not trickle charging all day and night.