Samsung Dex: A Desktop Experience for Android Devices

For those who are accustomed to using their Android devices as a desktop, Samsung Dex is an exciting new feature that allows users to transform their phone into a full-fledged computer. The settings for each individual app have been modified and simplified for the desktop experience, making it easier than ever to use your device in this way.

The first three apps that appear on the right-hand side of the screen are Twitter, YouTube, and "more". This suggests that Samsung Dex is designed to support a wide range of apps, including social media platforms and streaming services. The user interface has been optimized for desktop use, with the ability to quickly switch between different apps and access various settings.

Next to the notifications, there is a section labeled Quick Settings. These quick settings have been modified and simplified for the desktop experience, but some features don't quite make sense. For example, the flashlight feature is still present, even though it's not clear why it would be necessary on a desktop device. However, users can quickly turn on their phone's display to provide ambient lighting.

The Quick Settings also include Wi-Fi and audio output settings. The latter is particularly useful, as by default, Android devices output audio through the phone speaker rather than the display. This setting allows users to select their preferred audio output, which is a welcome feature for anyone who uses their device for video streaming or gaming.

In addition to the Quick Settings, there is also a Finder section. This allows users to open up the Universal Search tool, take a screen grab of the entire screen, and edit or share the file. The finder also includes a volume control, which enables users to individually adjust their volume settings. Furthermore, there is an on-screen keyboard that can be used with a mouse, effectively replacing the need for a physical keyboard.

The wallpapers section is also worth noting. When right-clicking on the desktop, users are presented with four different images to choose from, in addition to their gallery. This adds a touch of personality to the desktop experience and provides users with more flexibility when it comes to customizing their device.

One notable aspect of Samsung Dex is its full-screen app support. The YouTube app, for example, is well-suited for this layout, with all video controls displayed on the right-hand side of the screen. Users can also maximize videos by clicking a button, and exit full-screen mode by hitting escape. However, some apps may not be supported in this environment, as evidenced by the message that appears when trying to launch a game.

To access more advanced settings, users can visit the Samsung Dex panel, which allows them to adjust screen timeout and pointer speed. The pointer speed setting is particularly useful, as it enables users to quickly navigate their device using keyboard shortcuts. Users who are familiar with Apple devices will notice the reference to the "meta key", which corresponds to the Command key on an Apple keyboard.

The article continues by exploring some of the keyboard shortcut options available in Samsung Dex. The recent apps key allows users to close all open apps with a single click, and the pointer speed setting can be adjusted using keyboard shortcuts. This level of customization is a welcome feature for anyone who wants to tailor their desktop experience to their specific needs.

Overall, Samsung Dex is a powerful tool that transforms an Android device into a full-fledged computer. While it may not replace a traditional desktop for everyone, it provides users with the flexibility and portability they need to work or play on the go. As we've seen in this article, Samsung Dex offers many features and options that make it well-suited for its intended purpose.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys Mike here the Detroit Borg and today we're turning the Galaxy S8 into a desktop computer and we're going to do that thanks to the Dex station which is sold by Samsung this retails for about $150 and effectively this is just a hub to connect all the desktop peripherals you'll need to turn the phone into a computer getting to the accessories we get a quick start guide we also get a wall adapter this is the same adaptive fast charger that comes with a Galaxy S8 and of course we get a USBC cable so the dock itself is actually designed to be portable it folds up and can be stored easily but otherwise it's really meant to be used in only one orientation in this upright configuration so when you slot the phone in it makes connection to the USBC port at the bottom now this USBC Port is flexible so you won't damage the phone when you take it in and out now the dock itself is also cooled so if you look at the backside you'll see some ventilation that keeps the phone cool while it's charging and while you're using it with an external monitor so in terms of the ports along the back we have two USB type A ports we have an ethernet port in addition to an HDMI port and a USBC connector there's a few things to know about these ports these are USB 2.0 ports so they're not high-speed ports and of course just like any other USB port on a desktop this can be used for external storage so you can manage files on several drives such as hard drives or even card readers and use the onboard my files app to manage it all and of course because this is a phone you can place and receive phone calls or text messages in terms of our display output we have HDMI which reportedly supports 4K but currently that's not available just yet we also have a USB type-c connector so this will support charging in fact you need to be connected to USBC to power of the dock itself but otherwise this cannot be used for display output so even if you have a display that supports display output over USBC unfortunately that's not supported here just yet and of course with ethernet you can bypass Wi-Fi and go right for the Hardline connection this is kind of a nice feature especially since many laptops don't even have this now it is important to keep in mind that this is only compatible with the Galaxy S8 and the s+ but you can imagine future Galaxy devices like the next note will support this as well so in terms of setting this up of course you need a monitor now this supports any 1080p monitor over HDMI now of course this will work on other monitors like 4K or ultrawide monitors as I'm using now but it doesn't support those resolutions so right now it's just 1920x 1080 so if you use any other monitor it's going to have to scale to that resolution and in my case because I'm using this Ultra wide monitor it's going to be distorted of course the next ingredient we need is a keyboard and a mouse now a keyboard is still optional because we have an on-screen keyboard if you want to use that but you definitely need a mouse now they can be connected via a standard usba connector or you can use a wireless transmitter as I'm using or you can use Bluetooth directly to the phone itself so you have tons of connectivity options so once you get all the accessories connected to the dock you're ready to go ahead and Slot the phone into place and once you do you'll actually be prompted on the phone to either launch screen mirroring or the Dex experience so of course we want to go with the Dex experience and take a look at what's going on here now Dex is already baked into the Galaxy S8 you don't have to install anything it just happens soon as you connect it now it does take a few seconds to load it's not instantaneous but otherwise it's a pretty quick process now although it looks like a completely different experience you have to keep in mind that it's basically everything from your phone just reformatted for this screen which means you preserve all the apps and files from your phone despite the new look and of course you can disconnect your phone anytime and it restores everything back to the small screen so digging through this interface here it's pretty intuitive it's kind of like a cross between Chrome OS and Android and pretty much looks like any other desktop OS but there's a few things to know about here in the lower left corner here you have these Android keys and that does include our app drawer our recent apps and the home button so in terms of the app drawer we can scroll through our apps we also have a specific section just for apps that support the Dex interface so that does include our Microsoft apps and you can download those if you haven't already there's not a whole lot of apps here but uh there's already quite a few apps that support the scaling of decks we also have our recent apps so we can see all of our recently accessed apps and you can bring them forward just by tapping on them but of course just like any good Android device you can also close them all out or close them one at a time of course we also have a home button and the home button also activates the Google Voice Assistant just tap and hold and you'll see a pretty familiar interface now this is one of the apps that does not scale so you can't resize this but you can minimize it or bring it back forward now for apps that you can resize such as YouTube I can resize like so or I can maximize the window by hitting the maximize key just like any other desktop OS you can also minimize and maximize the app just by tapping the icons in the taskar so this taskbar is where you'll see all of your recently opened apps or your active apps all I have to do is bring them forward by tapping on them and if you hover the cursor over them you can see it does give you a preview of what each app is doing you can see I also just got a notification popup in the lower right corner so this is where all of your notifications will appear now for most of these apps if you close them out they disappear from the taskar but if you want to pin them you can do that now I'm just going to go to this app drawer and drag and drop something to the screen here I'm going to open it up and again this is one of the apps that does not scale it's got a fixed size here uh so you can see right now that the app if I close it will disappear so if I want to retain that app let's open it again what I'll have to do here is pin it to the taskbar so now when I close it here you can see just the icon disappears and I can go ahead and move it around just by clicking and holding and dragging it around again just like any other desktop OS same with the desktop now in terms of using multiple apps at once it's actually pretty surprising here now it does act differently than a desktop environment so right now you can see that this Instagram video is playing right now but if I click on another app you can see it suspends that's kind of a a trait you expect with Android so you do see that happening within the desktop experience as well but for things that support background play like YouTube you can see it uh continuously plays no matter what but overall it's pretty impressive in terms of of how it manages switching between these different windows and overall performance has been excellent and if you just want to hide all this just hit the home button and it goes away in terms of uninstalling you just go to the app drawer here right click and click uninstall of course we can also just search for the apps we want and then we can also go to our settings here so we can see apps for the Samsung Dex Samsung Dex settings so if you go to the Dex settings this will take you directly to the Dex control panel now of course with a keyboard attach if I start typing something here it just brings up search so Google search comes right up so in the lower right corner we have our expandable and collapsable status bar so this does include our notification so if you click on this this will show us all of our notifications which does have some pretty familiar features such as clear all and block notifications so this allows us to control the notification settings for each individual app of course we can also just jump to some of the recent notifications right here so I have the first three so Twitter Youtube and more of course right next to our notifications are the quick settings and the Quick Settings have been modified and simplified for the desktop experience but there's a few things here that don't quite make sense such as our flashlight so I'm not sure why that's still here but of course uh you can quickly turn on your flashlight if you just want some ambient light on your wall of course we have a few other things that are useful such as Wi-Fi and if you want to get to the control center for that specific setting just click and hold until it takes you right to it I think the most important quick setting to know about here is audio output because by default it outputs audio through the phone speaker not your display so this is where you go to select your display instead of your phone in this third section we also have our finder so this allows us to open up our Universal Search tool we also have a screen grab feature so you take a screen grab of the entire screen and you can edit or share that file uh we also have our volume control so we can individually control all of our volume settings and then we also have a keyboard so in theory you can actually just use a mouse with the deck you don't need a physical keyboard because you can use this onscreen keyboard if you want of course we also have wallpapers here so if you right click on the desktop we have four Images we can pick from in addition to our gallery now in terms of the full screen YouTube app you can see it's actually well suited for this layout it's kind of like landscape on a Android tablet effectively so you have all your uh videos along the right and then you can maximize our video right here by clicking that what you can't do here is change the screen resolution or the resolution of the video I'm not sure what resolution it is right now but it seems to be set to the maximum resolution which is 1080P and I can also hit escape to exit the full screen mode just like you would on a desktop and of course if I want to exit the uh full screen app here I'll have to hit the uh maximize or minimize button funny enough here you still have to swipe to dismiss a video playing in the background now not all apps will be supported here so for example if I go to the app drawer here and try to launch a game you'll get a pop up that tells us that it can't run in this mode now of course if we go to the settings panel we have a Samsung Dex panel and this will allow us to adjust the screen timeout we also have our pointer speed so we can change the speed of our cursor on the screen by default I think it's a little too fast so I would dial that back uh we also have our onscreen keyboard settings if you want to pick a different onscreen keyboard you can we do have text to speech in here as well so that will work using the microphone on the phone now if you're a fan of keyboard shortcuts you're going to want to take a look at pointer speed and physical keyboard settings so if we go to keyboard shortcuts you can see all of them that are available here so some of this is pretty familiar so for example if you want to toggle through your apps you have alt Tab and a few others now you'll see reference to this meta key that's basically referring to whatever keyboard you're using so in my case I'm using an Apple keyboard so I would use the command key for that function so for example if I want to open up the browser I would hit meta B and so forth now there's a few others they don't mention here such as command Q for Quick Settings as well as command f for the finder and I just want to do one last thing here with the recent apps key so if I click close all you'll see all of those icons disappear so ultimately this is not going to replace a desktop for most people but it does get the job done especially if you are used to Chrome in other circumstances so for example you're not going to be doing much video editing here but there are apps that supported but right now they're not apps that I personally use and of course there's less gaming options in this environment because most games for Android devices do need some sort of touch interface but in the end this is one of those things that you wonder why it took so long for Samsung to implement because it works so well and really does serve a need that a lot of people have which is to just park their phone at a desk and get work done all righty guys so I really enjoyed playing with this if you guys enjoyed this video please let me know with a thumbs up and I'll see you again in my next videowhat's up guys Mike here the Detroit Borg and today we're turning the Galaxy S8 into a desktop computer and we're going to do that thanks to the Dex station which is sold by Samsung this retails for about $150 and effectively this is just a hub to connect all the desktop peripherals you'll need to turn the phone into a computer getting to the accessories we get a quick start guide we also get a wall adapter this is the same adaptive fast charger that comes with a Galaxy S8 and of course we get a USBC cable so the dock itself is actually designed to be portable it folds up and can be stored easily but otherwise it's really meant to be used in only one orientation in this upright configuration so when you slot the phone in it makes connection to the USBC port at the bottom now this USBC Port is flexible so you won't damage the phone when you take it in and out now the dock itself is also cooled so if you look at the backside you'll see some ventilation that keeps the phone cool while it's charging and while you're using it with an external monitor so in terms of the ports along the back we have two USB type A ports we have an ethernet port in addition to an HDMI port and a USBC connector there's a few things to know about these ports these are USB 2.0 ports so they're not high-speed ports and of course just like any other USB port on a desktop this can be used for external storage so you can manage files on several drives such as hard drives or even card readers and use the onboard my files app to manage it all and of course because this is a phone you can place and receive phone calls or text messages in terms of our display output we have HDMI which reportedly supports 4K but currently that's not available just yet we also have a USB type-c connector so this will support charging in fact you need to be connected to USBC to power of the dock itself but otherwise this cannot be used for display output so even if you have a display that supports display output over USBC unfortunately that's not supported here just yet and of course with ethernet you can bypass Wi-Fi and go right for the Hardline connection this is kind of a nice feature especially since many laptops don't even have this now it is important to keep in mind that this is only compatible with the Galaxy S8 and the s+ but you can imagine future Galaxy devices like the next note will support this as well so in terms of setting this up of course you need a monitor now this supports any 1080p monitor over HDMI now of course this will work on other monitors like 4K or ultrawide monitors as I'm using now but it doesn't support those resolutions so right now it's just 1920x 1080 so if you use any other monitor it's going to have to scale to that resolution and in my case because I'm using this Ultra wide monitor it's going to be distorted of course the next ingredient we need is a keyboard and a mouse now a keyboard is still optional because we have an on-screen keyboard if you want to use that but you definitely need a mouse now they can be connected via a standard usba connector or you can use a wireless transmitter as I'm using or you can use Bluetooth directly to the phone itself so you have tons of connectivity options so once you get all the accessories connected to the dock you're ready to go ahead and Slot the phone into place and once you do you'll actually be prompted on the phone to either launch screen mirroring or the Dex experience so of course we want to go with the Dex experience and take a look at what's going on here now Dex is already baked into the Galaxy S8 you don't have to install anything it just happens soon as you connect it now it does take a few seconds to load it's not instantaneous but otherwise it's a pretty quick process now although it looks like a completely different experience you have to keep in mind that it's basically everything from your phone just reformatted for this screen which means you preserve all the apps and files from your phone despite the new look and of course you can disconnect your phone anytime and it restores everything back to the small screen so digging through this interface here it's pretty intuitive it's kind of like a cross between Chrome OS and Android and pretty much looks like any other desktop OS but there's a few things to know about here in the lower left corner here you have these Android keys and that does include our app drawer our recent apps and the home button so in terms of the app drawer we can scroll through our apps we also have a specific section just for apps that support the Dex interface so that does include our Microsoft apps and you can download those if you haven't already there's not a whole lot of apps here but uh there's already quite a few apps that support the scaling of decks we also have our recent apps so we can see all of our recently accessed apps and you can bring them forward just by tapping on them but of course just like any good Android device you can also close them all out or close them one at a time of course we also have a home button and the home button also activates the Google Voice Assistant just tap and hold and you'll see a pretty familiar interface now this is one of the apps that does not scale so you can't resize this but you can minimize it or bring it back forward now for apps that you can resize such as YouTube I can resize like so or I can maximize the window by hitting the maximize key just like any other desktop OS you can also minimize and maximize the app just by tapping the icons in the taskar so this taskbar is where you'll see all of your recently opened apps or your active apps all I have to do is bring them forward by tapping on them and if you hover the cursor over them you can see it does give you a preview of what each app is doing you can see I also just got a notification popup in the lower right corner so this is where all of your notifications will appear now for most of these apps if you close them out they disappear from the taskar but if you want to pin them you can do that now I'm just going to go to this app drawer and drag and drop something to the screen here I'm going to open it up and again this is one of the apps that does not scale it's got a fixed size here uh so you can see right now that the app if I close it will disappear so if I want to retain that app let's open it again what I'll have to do here is pin it to the taskbar so now when I close it here you can see just the icon disappears and I can go ahead and move it around just by clicking and holding and dragging it around again just like any other desktop OS same with the desktop now in terms of using multiple apps at once it's actually pretty surprising here now it does act differently than a desktop environment so right now you can see that this Instagram video is playing right now but if I click on another app you can see it suspends that's kind of a a trait you expect with Android so you do see that happening within the desktop experience as well but for things that support background play like YouTube you can see it uh continuously plays no matter what but overall it's pretty impressive in terms of of how it manages switching between these different windows and overall performance has been excellent and if you just want to hide all this just hit the home button and it goes away in terms of uninstalling you just go to the app drawer here right click and click uninstall of course we can also just search for the apps we want and then we can also go to our settings here so we can see apps for the Samsung Dex Samsung Dex settings so if you go to the Dex settings this will take you directly to the Dex control panel now of course with a keyboard attach if I start typing something here it just brings up search so Google search comes right up so in the lower right corner we have our expandable and collapsable status bar so this does include our notification so if you click on this this will show us all of our notifications which does have some pretty familiar features such as clear all and block notifications so this allows us to control the notification settings for each individual app of course we can also just jump to some of the recent notifications right here so I have the first three so Twitter Youtube and more of course right next to our notifications are the quick settings and the Quick Settings have been modified and simplified for the desktop experience but there's a few things here that don't quite make sense such as our flashlight so I'm not sure why that's still here but of course uh you can quickly turn on your flashlight if you just want some ambient light on your wall of course we have a few other things that are useful such as Wi-Fi and if you want to get to the control center for that specific setting just click and hold until it takes you right to it I think the most important quick setting to know about here is audio output because by default it outputs audio through the phone speaker not your display so this is where you go to select your display instead of your phone in this third section we also have our finder so this allows us to open up our Universal Search tool we also have a screen grab feature so you take a screen grab of the entire screen and you can edit or share that file uh we also have our volume control so we can individually control all of our volume settings and then we also have a keyboard so in theory you can actually just use a mouse with the deck you don't need a physical keyboard because you can use this onscreen keyboard if you want of course we also have wallpapers here so if you right click on the desktop we have four Images we can pick from in addition to our gallery now in terms of the full screen YouTube app you can see it's actually well suited for this layout it's kind of like landscape on a Android tablet effectively so you have all your uh videos along the right and then you can maximize our video right here by clicking that what you can't do here is change the screen resolution or the resolution of the video I'm not sure what resolution it is right now but it seems to be set to the maximum resolution which is 1080P and I can also hit escape to exit the full screen mode just like you would on a desktop and of course if I want to exit the uh full screen app here I'll have to hit the uh maximize or minimize button funny enough here you still have to swipe to dismiss a video playing in the background now not all apps will be supported here so for example if I go to the app drawer here and try to launch a game you'll get a pop up that tells us that it can't run in this mode now of course if we go to the settings panel we have a Samsung Dex panel and this will allow us to adjust the screen timeout we also have our pointer speed so we can change the speed of our cursor on the screen by default I think it's a little too fast so I would dial that back uh we also have our onscreen keyboard settings if you want to pick a different onscreen keyboard you can we do have text to speech in here as well so that will work using the microphone on the phone now if you're a fan of keyboard shortcuts you're going to want to take a look at pointer speed and physical keyboard settings so if we go to keyboard shortcuts you can see all of them that are available here so some of this is pretty familiar so for example if you want to toggle through your apps you have alt Tab and a few others now you'll see reference to this meta key that's basically referring to whatever keyboard you're using so in my case I'm using an Apple keyboard so I would use the command key for that function so for example if I want to open up the browser I would hit meta B and so forth now there's a few others they don't mention here such as command Q for Quick Settings as well as command f for the finder and I just want to do one last thing here with the recent apps key so if I click close all you'll see all of those icons disappear so ultimately this is not going to replace a desktop for most people but it does get the job done especially if you are used to Chrome in other circumstances so for example you're not going to be doing much video editing here but there are apps that supported but right now they're not apps that I personally use and of course there's less gaming options in this environment because most games for Android devices do need some sort of touch interface but in the end this is one of those things that you wonder why it took so long for Samsung to implement because it works so well and really does serve a need that a lot of people have which is to just park their phone at a desk and get work done all righty guys so I really enjoyed playing with this if you guys enjoyed this video please let me know with a thumbs up and I'll see you again in my next video\n"