this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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I had this dream in 2010 (not literally a dream, just a notion) that someday, we'd replace desktops with phones... like, sit down at a desk, attach it to a dock, it would connect to a monitor, mouse and keyboard and you could use it like a desktop PC. I suppose we could already do that, other than that the software would still be phone apps not made to be used with a mouse or for the most part a landscape screen.
You're describing Samsung Dex
I had high hopes for Dex when it was first announced and I was on android for my phone, but dragging around a monitor was more work than just bringing my laptop. I got a 12.9" iPad a couple years ago as a portable library, then last year thought I might replace my (Windows) laptop by adding a keyboard and mouse to the iPad so I wouldn't have to take both into the field for minor work. I've also got a Samsung S7 so I tested it out as well. The capability/usability gap between the full desktop version of Word and the mobile versions made me give up. Understand I have a dozen templates, from simple to complex, in Word, and around 20 calculation or tracking Excel sheets - so transitioning to Pages/Docs and Sheets/Numbers would cost me about $20k in productivity time. And I still wouldn't have my CAD, finite element analysis, or industry-specific utilities with me.
My current setup is Fold4 with BT keyboard and mouse. This is what I use instead of laptop for work when traveling. It's not perfect but more capable than expected. DeX is surprisingly usable but mobile applications lack in some areas. Luckily most of my work is around code so getting Termux solves most of the issues. S7 Galaxy Tab should have pretty capable DeX implementation which doesn't require external screen to work. For me just foldable screen is good enough for writing code.
It really worked well for my use case during the pandemic. I was in a research lab and while I did most of my computational work from home, when I had experiments to do I would go in, and used dex to update my data spreadsheets and collect imaging, upload to our computational cluster and be able to run some basic stuff on that through an ssh terminal. I was just using Google sheets for my basic data entry. And I had a dock already set up there for my laptop, which had attached ethernet, a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. So I could just plug my phone into the USB c and have an instant solution that worked just like a computer and connected to the secure network over ethernet (which was required for the fastest upload to the cluster).
The biggest limitations was only being able to have 5 windows open at once, but for the limited tasks I needed to do, it worked well enough.