Microsoft Surface Laptop and Windows 10 S
Phone notifications live down in the bottom right of the display, with individual alerts popping up in small boxes as they arrive, and you can click a small arrow icon to bring up the full list. These are quite nifty, although with the ability to multitask on a full-sized monitor they’re not quite as essential as they are on a phone. You can even make and take phone calls in docked mode. The ‘phone’ app runs in its own small window and voice and audio are routed to speakerphone.
APP SUPPORT
What’ll make or break DeX for most people is app support — specifically, whether the ones you want to use are actually coded properly to be used in DeX’s desktop mode. With respect to the latter, we found that Android apps fall into two general categories: apps designed for phones only — displayed in fixed, phone-sized windows (which you can swivel into either portrait or landscape modes — and apps that are properly responsive and can have their windows resized and rescaled, just like regular desktop ones.
You can comfortably fit about four phonesized apps in portrait mode across a standard 1080p display, and using them is identical to on a phone, albeit with some pros and cons from using a mouse-and-keyboard vs a fingertip and swipes.
Which apps work in which mode isn’t entirely predictable. Chrome, for example, works great in desktop mode — it’s almost indistinguishable from its full-fat PC counterpart, with tabs running across the top and even support for multiple windows — although you can’t install any kind of extensions or add-ons.
Likewise, Microsoft’s Office apps (Word, Excel and PowerPoint come pre-installed on both S8 models) also work remarkably well in DeX mode, having heavily button-laden interfaces. The tie-in with Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud-storage service means that it’s easy to switch between devices; however, you do need a paid Office 365 subscription in order to edit any of your documents or spreadsheets.
Google’s Drive (nee Docs) suite of apps are conversely (and perplexingly) more miss — the Android versions don’t correctly scale for large-screen device use, meaning you’re essentially running the smartphone versions. While you can resized Drive apps so they run full-screen, it’s impossible to ignore that these are still massively cut-back mobile versions. The Sheets interface, for example, is so oversized as to be useless, and you get a very lite version of Docs, sans most toolbars and buttons. You’re far better off resorting to opening Drive apps in Chrome instead.
While this’ll vary from person to person, we found that our regular selection of Android apps was split roughly 50/50 as to whether they worked or not. The Google Play Store and Samsung’s core productivity apps (Gallery, Email, Internet, My Files) all let you resize them, as does Gmail and ABC iview. Our favourite newsreading app Feedly would only run in phone mode, however,
Also worthy of note is that starting or stopping DeX will see most apps close and reopen with the change of mode — you need to make sure you’ve saved anything you’re working on to avoid data loss, although with cloud-based services, this is usually automatic.
PERFECT MEDIA PLAYER?
With lots of Android-based media players on the market, we thought this might be one of DeX’s stronger areas, although it sadly didn’t turn out that way. DeX lacks an exclusive fullscreen display mode, so there’s no way to have a video just expand and fill the entire screen — the taskbar and any app window borders and controls (like the ‘back’, ‘minimise’ and ‘close’ that sit on each app’s top bar) are always visible.
And maddeningly, a lot of video-centric apps either aren’t built with responsive interfaces or didn’t detect that this was an option, so they can only be used in fixed phone-sized windows. That includes Plex, our favourite media centre app that we’ve talked about setting up in this month’s superguide.
And in case it needed spelling out, it’s also basically useless for gaming. Games made for fast-paced finger input (particularly swiping) do not translate well to being controlled with a mouse and keyboard.
WHO’S IT FOR?
DeX is far from perfect, then — although a lot of that actually comes down to third-party Android apps, rather than being anything to do with how Samsung’s implementation. If your computing needs are simple (web browsing, email, office docs and so on), this could certainly replace a regular PC, but there are many caveats, and ones that you might not discover until you’ve tested the device with your own range of apps.