There’s A Whole Computer Inside This Mouse

[Gadget Industry] bills it as “a PC inside a Mouse“, but that depends on your definition of a “PC”. This is a Personal Computer inside a mouse, yes, but there’s nothing IBM-compatible about the tiny ARM board he squeezes inside what’s normally a peripheral — it actually started life as a smartphone, which only takes this build up a notch compared to starting with a single-board computer like a Pi.

Specifically, he starts with a Galaxy S21 5G. Starting with a Samsung means he can leave the stock Android alone and just take advantage of Samsung’s DeX desktop mode, rather than layer a Linux environment on top or replace the operating system entirely with something like Postmarket OS, which are both viable options.

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Are We Finally At The Point Where Phones Can Replace Computers?

There was an ideal of convergence, a long time ago, when one device would be all you need, digitally speaking. [ETA Prime] on YouTube seems to think we’ve reached that point, and his recent video about the Samsung S26 Ultra makes a good case for it. Part of that is software: Samsung’s DeX is a huge enabler for this use case. Part of that his hardware: the S26 Ultra, as the upcoming latest-and-greatest flagship phone, has absurd stats and a price tag to match.

First, it’s got 12 GB of that unobtanium once called “RAM”. It’s got an 8-core ARM processor in its Snapdragon Elite SOC, with the two performance cores clocked at 4.74 GHz — which isn’t a world record, but it’s pretty snappy. The other six cores aren’t just doddling along at 3.62 GHz. Except for the very youngest of our readers, you probably remember a time when the world’s greatest supercomputers had as much computing power as this phone.

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