Samsung has been thinking up new ways to transform smartphones into laptops. In a patent application filed last week, first spotted by Patently Mobile, Samsung describes a mobile device that runs Android and is able to switch over to Windows when inserted into a dock. Individually, these ideas aren't new — dual-OS devices and docking smartphones have been tried a number of times over the past several years — but they haven't been put together in a particularly straightforward way. Of course, this is only a patent application, so there's no guarantee that Samsung will actually make it.

Even so, Samsung actually goes into quite a bit of detail on how such a device would work. The core would be a smartphone or a tablet, which would hold everything needed to run both Android and Windows. The dock would have a keyboard, a large display, and possibly a trackpad. Those final two items are where it gets interesting. The dock may not need a trackpad because the smartphone's touchscreen could be used instead (given the state of Windows trackpads, this could even be a benefit). Alternatively, if the dock includes a trackpad, the smartphone could be used as a second display. Samsung proposes that it could display Android at the same time that the dock displays Windows, or that it could be an extension of the Windows desktop.

The patent application notes that other operating systems could be used in place of Windows and Android, but those are the two that it focuses on. That's not really a surprise: they're the dominant mobile and desktop operating systems, and Samsung has even played around with transitioning between the two of them before. In 2013, it introduced the Ativ Q, which could switch between functioning as a Windows notebook and an Android tablet. Of course, making both form factors actually good to use is difficult, especially when all of their power is coming from a mobile device. Still, the idea that a single device could eventually serve as the core of all our computing isn't unreasonable, and it's clearly something that Samsung is thinking about.