Do you think a ghetto solution like this with plugs sticking out (and will obviously have alignment issues) is a proper dock? Seriously, why even mention this?
Because PC docks also suck.
The bottom line is that the 'connector on the bottom' dock looks good in theory, but they still remain pretty klunky in real world use.
And I've yet to see one that's "Hot Swappable".
Who cares? They don't have a dock. End of story.
The point is that they're trying...which should be important to those who demand having a dock (ie, you). Since I don't have a compelling need for a dock at home, its merely an exercise in technology monitoring.
Have you tried every dock for every PC? There is nothing clunky about the one I use for my Dell M6300. Haven't had a problem. Ever. And neither have my coworkers.
And you have? At least we have that Dell dock design in our office, as well as others, and that I personally have a decade's worth of real world (business) hands-on pragmatic use. In general, the Thinkpads are our most preferred laptops: their docks are less bad and the hardware doesn't get beaten up as much from frequent travel.
If you know of a better mousetrap, we'll consider buying a handful of them to try. Unfortunately, that Dell is already in the "Tried It" block. The biggest design shortcoming with the Dell design is in the UI for how the human has to try to eyeball his way in to find the connector. Those that have a backstop tend to help out with one of the alignment dimensions, although there's caveats with this when a larger capacity battery is affixed.
You're crazy if you think wireless video and power will go mainstream for laptops in the next 5 years.
With the proliferation of cheap netbooks and the like on the laptop market, its certainly not going to be mainstream.
However, that doesn't mean that it won't be utterly absent, either.
Afterall, wireless inductive power transmission has already been around for years, plus cellphone recharging tech has been demonstrated. And for wireless HD video, all you effectively need is a television ATSC (or ATSC-like) implementation.
And if you do your homework, you'll also realize that since you don't need much transmission power to cross a few meters, it can use solid state components. Now all you have to do is to go do a tad more homework to find out what SS technology already exists at what RF frequencies that would be useful for this application.
Meanwhile, you've got nothing right now.
If a dock for a laptop was that profound to my needs, I'd simply switch operating systems and put in another Thinkpad and dock.
No, you will not have to connect an audio wire nor USB. The dock I'm using right now has provision for audio out and USB. You hook it up once, just like your video, keyboard, mouse, etc. and you never have to do it again.
FYI, another interesting intellectual exercise is to see how much can all be currently done over a single Ethernet connection...even to include power...with currently available - - but simply not integrated - - off-the-shelf technologies. YMMV as to how outrageously far-fetched either thus is.
-hh
PS: Wireless USB is also an alternative that exists today...
current implimentations of the 1.0 specification just isn't quite up to streaming HD video, but they claim that v1.1 is soon come.
How are they going to deal with interference/etc and consequences like latency etcetc? Ok to buffer these things for some uses, not for others (and certainly not for the simple idea of a 'wireless video connection').
