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Hands-On I tap this story on a phone – a Galaxy S9 + to be precise, housed in Samsung's new "DeX Pad", which turns its high-end phones into laptops when
Samsung introduced the Dex with Galaxy S8 2017, and then updated this year with a smaller dock that puts the phone in a horizontal position and turns it into a touch pad. This is an important thing because as a portable device, the DeX Pad is a wash: you need a USB charger, a keyboard and an HDMI cable to make it work. Samsung recommends that you only use the included HDMI cable, so it should also be stored in your bag, making it a cable nest before even adding a mouse to the mix.
Once installed, the device is well balanced. The DeX Pad contains power, two USB and USB-C cables at the back. The USB-C's Galaxy device fits nicely on the dock. And the thinking has clearly focused on things like making sure the headset jack of the phone stays available.
The Dex desktop is well designed too: if you used a WIMP interface * at any time in the last three decades, you will be home within minutes. You will also see enough Android to make the jump to desktop mode easily.
I do most of my work in a browser and once I logged in to my personal account I noticed little significant difference between the way I worked the way I work in MacOS or Windows . I had to deal with the minor boredom of most web apps assuming that they were on a mobile device rather than on a desktop computer. It meant chasing to reset them to desktop mode and then coming back later once I was using the phone as a phone.
I found that I could excuse this because the applications behaved well in Dex mode, just like Microsoft Office. There are few things that prevent you from being as productive on Dex as on a PC.
The file system is now powerful enough that galaxy storage or a cloud file lock is easily accessible. Finding documents to work on is not a problem.
Some Android apps display warnings saying that they are not completely happy with the Dex mode, but this seems like a precaution rather than a warning sign of quirk. I've also missed a few right-click opportunities that mobile apps do not support, but these are little things.
I'm a mouse guy, so I'm happy to use Dex with a rodent rather than a touchpad. But it is responsive and I found the glass surface of the S9 + a more pleasant surface than the touchpad of my laptop and in any case damaging to the accuracy of the cursor positioning.
One thing that could be done better is USB-C support for video. a cable experience would further reduce clutter. Of course, USB-C is far from being ubiquitous in tellies, but that's the thing coming in monitors
Overall, the DeX Pad does a pretty good job of almost everything … except to give you a reason to use it
replacing a laptop because it 's just not as clean and needs a screen. It does not really work in front of a television because it needs a keyboard and a wireless mouse, which makes the touchpad trick irrelevant. And even though it's fast and clever, I can not see Android as a desktop replacement.
But I say it as someone whose professional computer life has always involved a desktop metaphor. The rooted habits that are created may mean that some obvious uses for newer devices escape me. For example, I currently play with the Apple iPad 2018. If any other major PC provider offered you to adopt its $ 300 low-cost machine as the main machine, you would risk getting them out of your office. The current iPad is wonderfully set up, has a gorgeous screen, a stellar battery life and a brilliant operating system. Still, I can not find a use for his pen or augmented reality features and I do not want to tap on the glass, but I like it as the Kindle Poshest of the world.
Maybe the lack of modern imagination is why I could not find an obvious use for the DeX Pad, but a hint it has two possible uses.
I'm calling a "splashdown" and I imagine that it involves field workers who spend their days entering data into a fleeing galaxy device could come back to base, or at home, where a DeX Pad already plugged allows them to do a job too hard to do on a small screen.
To explain the other, I have to remember a conversation that I had with an Intel exec who explained that PC purchases are dictated by the size of the houses. Japan, it's been said, is one of the few places where all-in-one TVs / computers have flourished, mainly because there's no many places to put a computer in small urban apartments. But in the big suburban houses, minitowers are still walking the land. The observations of the exec suggest to me that there is a physical niche for the DeX Pad. I suspect that just as the iPad has become a de facto standard at the point of sale, something of interest awaits the DeX Pad at $ 99 / $ 52.99 / US $ 149
and you will do much worse than getting your hands on one. to understand what this interesting scenario is, because once you find it, I think the DeX Pad will make you proud. ®
* WIMP = "Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer" in case you forgot or are too young to know
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