This $99 accessory turns your phone into a laptop – and you can even play Pokemon Go on it

Imagine you’re a student struggling with graphs and other online course material on your mobile app. Imagine you’re a writer struggling to post a story from your phone at an event. Imagine you can’t afford a laptop or just don’t like to lug one around.

For all of you, and many others, there’s now a US$99 accessory that turns your Android smartphone into a laptop. Called Superbook, it launched today on Kickstarter. It’s a creation of Andromium – a Bay Area startup by Google and Y Combinator alumni Gordon Zheng and Andrew Jiang.

Superbook is actually a laptop shell. In other words, it looks like a laptop and acts like one, but doesn’t have its own operating system, memory, or processor that would make it a computer. For all that, it needs a smartphone to be hooked to it.

We get a lot of requests from … people who can’t afford a high-end laptop.

What it does have are a 11.6 inch screen, a mouse and keyboard, and a multi-touch trackpad – just like a laptop. Once you hook your smartphone to it, all the browsers and other apps on it will run on the Superbook – the only difference being that you’re no longer working on a tiny screen. And it weighs less than 0.9 kg.

What’s more, it has eight hours or more of battery life and your smartphone gets charged while it’s hooked up. Do you need a superphone for it? No. Any of the popular smartphones in the Samsung Galaxy class with a USB OTG (USB On The Go) will do.

You just need to download the Andromium app from the playstore, which makes the Superbook come to life as soon as it’s connected by the USB OTG. Neat?

See: 500 Mobile Collective places its first bet on an Android OS that runs on PCs

A computer in your pocket

I asked Andrew Jiang, co-founder and COO at San Francisco-based Andromium, if things would slow down in the Superbook, compared to how they work in their native environment on the phone.

“Not really,” replied Andrew. “Mostly we act as a light layer on top of Android, providing a few enhancements to the OS, including memory management and additional feature support. But everything else pretty much runs on the power of your smartphone.”

Most of us take our smartphones for granted, and underutilize what is essentially a powerful computer. The screen size is the biggest constraint, preventing us from using it more like a computer. Superbook is an attempt to unlock that potential.

The idea was rejected by Google