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Acer shows off 'Extend' app allowing you to control your phone from your PC
For every promising concept we see, there's one that gets scrapped before ever making it to market. That's what happened with Acer's "Extend" dock, an accessory that would have allowed you to connect your smartphone to a clamshell-style dock with a display, keyboard and a spare battery to recharge your handset. Turns out, lots of people already carry laptops, and don't necessarily need to transform their phones into a de facto tablet or netbook. What they do need, though, is to move stuff on and off their phone, or pick up on their PC where they left off on their handset.
Acer Extend concept is a smartphone workstation, we go hands-on (video)
In addition to letting us get our hands on all its IFA announcements today, Acer pulled back the curtain on a concept device. The Acer Extend prototype works similarly to the ASUS Padfone, letting you connect your smartphone to a clamshell-style dock with a display, keyboard and a 6,000mAh battery to recharge your handset. For the purposes of the demo, a modified version of Acer's Liquid E2 smartphone was connected to the Extend dock via an MHL cable, though company reps said a market-ready version could include a retractable cord. Even more compelling, though, would be a wireless, Bluetooth-based solution. In addition to offering much more screen real estate than a phone, the dock solution nets you a full-size, tactile keyboard, and Acer's optimized island-style layout to work with a smartphone's operating system. To that end, there are buttons for Mail, WiFi, Bluetooth and more -- more or less the options you'll find in an Android phone's Settings menu. Though the keyboard is tailored to a smartphone interface, the Extend lets you view apps such as Gmail in tablet format, meaning you'll reap the full benefits of the larger display. There's also a full-size touchpad on board.
