I think at this point the niche would be well-served if one could have a competent clamp-on landscape keyboard (so close, clicks keyboard) for their phone they could use to RDP into a better machine that could run while the phone is off. Additionally nice would be if the phone had a fully functional usb-c port that could do DP and usb for docking. At that point I'd have serious thoughts about retiring my backpack or nanote next. It frustrates me how close we are, if such a keyboard existed for $80 or so

I've been occasionally using Microsoft's RDP Client [0] on my iPhone with external keyboard + mouse with a usb-c cable into my external monitor (with a Logitech RF dongle connected to the back of it).

It worked okay, the mouse support is somewhat of a hack, but keyboard works awesome.

The biggest annoyance was actually getting RDP to work satisfactory on a linux box with no external monitor plugged in to it (hetzner box).

I thought someone would have created an app to run browser on the external screen in full resolution, so I could skip RDP and use vscode server via the browser. But the only option seems to be infinitex2p which is not available in the EU :(.

[0]: Which in typical Microsoft idiotic fashion semi recently got renamed to "Windows app"... [1]: https://x.com/infinitex2p

I've run vscode over ssh via tailscale before and it was pretty good, I'm mostly connecting to a remote using rustdesk however, that also requires a "dummy" hdmi to operate. The only thing it needs to make it perfect would be if there were officially supported forwarded web browsing windows in vscode. I wish apple would actually let us use "our" usb-c as.. usb-c