10 years ago, it wouldn’t have been thought possible to have a computer the size of a mobile phone. But now phones are so powerful that it is possible for your phone to be a computer, and house in its 6-inch glass casing a processor that rivals a mid-range computer. Welcome to the future.
Samsung Dex is built into the ‘Samsung Experience’ skin that Samsung puts on top of Android, and it is amazing how much can be done with just your phone, a monitor, and a mouse and keyboard. The only connection you need is a USB-C to HDMI cable and you have a computer. This is our future, where our phones will be able to be anything. With the power of apps, our phones can already do so much, but they can’t replace your computer, right? Well, now you can have a desktop experience completely powered by your phone, which makes productivity tasks such as sending emails and especially writing up documents.
Samsung Dex’s interface is nice, not like an oversized Android tablet, they have created this software from scratch, but it does share some resemblances with Windows with the positioning of the exit, restore, and minimize buttons. You can even run Windows through a virtual machine if you don’t like Samsung’s interface, so you really can have a full Windows PC running on just your phone. You can do tasks that you would usually do on your phone from Dex, like taking phone calls and sending text messages.
There are some downsides to Samsung Dex, however, and one of those being App Optimisation, but this will only get better as it goes on, so I’m not too worried about it. Most apps only support filling the size of a phone, on the large screen of the monitor. However, Samsung teamed up with Microsoft so that the important productivity apps like Word and Outlook can be resized correctly, just like Samsung’s native apps.
The performance that such a small device can put out is simply amazing, and it really shows in the use of Dex, which seems smooth and optimised. The raw power of it S9 rivals that of my Dell Inspiron 3000, which has an Intel i5-8250U inside, the Geekbench 4 results are below.
Overall Samsung Dex proves that the reality that we don’t need computers anymore is getting closer each year, and as other prominent companies in the smartphone market such as Huawei with Pocket PC, we will see more and more of this reality.
Tech Input 