Samsung DeX Station
SAMSUNG’S DEX STATION PROMISES TO LET YOU USE YOUR GALAXY S8 AS IF IT WERE A DESKTOP COMPUTER. SO DOES IT ACTUALLY WORK — AND WOULD YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO USE IT?
It’S A DREAM that predates the smartphone revolution by at least a few decades: the idea that, one day, we’ll all be able to have just one little digital device that caters to all our computing needs. However, it’s been the rise of smartphones over the last decade for that dream to realistically seem within our grasp.
We’ve seen a few attempts at bringing this concept to life, often from smaller vendors, although HP’s even having a crack with its Windows Mobile-based Elite x3 handset. With the DeX Station, Samsung is perhaps the highest-profile company to try the idea yet. DeX is essentially a palm-sized pod that you can plug a mouse, keyboard and monitor into, and then plonk your Galaxy S8 (or S8+) into the cradle on top, with the video image thereafter output to the monitor and the whole setup able to be used as if it were a desktop PC.
Now, there are some obvious limitations to this right off the bat — it’s hardly convenient to be carrying around a keyboard, mouse and monitor with you everywhere you go, but the dock itself is at least small enough that it’s feasible business travellers could combine it with a small keyboard-and-trackpad combo unit and then plug into a hotel-room TV while they’re on the road. The same could theoretically go for home-based users who don’t have particularly taxing computing needs.
So if your needs are basic, can an Android phone really replace your desktop?
DEX IN USE
Once you’ve got the dock all plugged in, using DeX is pretty much seamless. ‘DeX mode’ support is already baked into the S8 and S8+, so all you need to do to start using it is plug your phone into the dock, tap the ‘Switch to Dex Mode’ button that pops up on screen, then wait around five seconds for the mode-change to initialise. And after this first time, the S8 automatically switches to DeX mode when plugged in.
On your monitor, you get a what looks like a fairly typical and intuitive Windows (or Linux) desktop computing interface — a taskbar down the bottom with an area for status icons to the right. This bar works pretty much the same as Windows’ one, containing icons for all your running apps and, in place of the Start button, you’ve got they typical Android buttons for Home, Recents and Apps. Click on Apps and you have a searchable list of everything installed on your phone, so you can quickly start typing an app’s name to find and launch it. The Home button minimises everything on screen and the Recents button gives you eight onscreen tiles for quick switching to apps already running.
Android actually has keyboard and mouse support built in, so they work exactly as they do on a desktop computer, and they’re nice and responsive, too.