4 ms·

Can I get one of those for my iPhone as well? It has more than enough power for general purpose computing.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wkat4242 3y ago
If you're not bound to iOS: yes. Samsung DeX is just that. I can plug it into the Lenovo dock at work and have a personal pc on the go. Id imagine this kind of thing is way too geeky for Apple to make though.
- bottlepalm 3y ago
  Microsoft could have given the Windows phone some significant value with this kind of functionality. We’d be living in a different world.
- jc_dc 3y ago
  Have you actually used it for general computing tasks? If so, how was it?
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Oh yes, a lot. Our work environment is incredibly restricted so I can't easily connect to my home stuff. I have everything behind VPN which is blocked on the company network, I have no admin rights to do anything etc. I also require yubikeys (openPGP mode) to log into pretty much everything at home and the toolchain for this also can't be installed on my work stuff. SSH is also blocked, etc. So, what I do when I have something I need to mess with at home, is plug in my personal phone into the work dock. It has a completely independent 5G connection so I can do whatever I want, without needing to circumvent company protections, and without even using the company network at all. In DeX I mostly use outlook, webbrowser and Termux (which is amazing) for SSH using OpenPGP (using OKCAgent and OpenKeyChain to talk to the Yubikey). The office apps are also nice and very dex-enabled (they have a UI much more like a desktop than like a tablet in DeX mode) but I rarely use them. Same with Chrome etc, it has a full tab bar etc. Unfortunately firefox is not quite there yet, it's pretty sucky in DeX. I use element for all my chats (using matrix bridges to whatsapp etc) and that works OK in DeX. It also lacks a good "desktop-style" interface unfortunately. But overall it's pretty ok, it's definitely workable. There's a few annoying quirks but they're all pretty easy to work around. One of the issues is that the screen on the phone is often activated for no reason (leading me to worry about burn-in), but force-killing the apps in phone mode and then opening in DeX mostly fixes that. I wish Samsung would go all the way and really streamline this, but right now they're in a phase where DeX is basically neglected. Every few years they have a big marketing boost and they polish it up again but now they're in neglect mode :) Nevertheless it works ok though. PS: One major usecase I've seen people use is also to use remote desktop in fullscreen which solves a lot of its quirks obviously but it's not quite as standalone as I'd like. TL;DR: Great feature for when you need it and have a suitable dock nearby (or hotel TV and bluetooth keyboard/mouse), not something I'd use as a daily driver at this point.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

If you're not bound to iOS: yes. Samsung DeX is just that. I can plug it into the Lenovo dock at work and have a personal pc on the go. Id imagine this kind of thing is way too geeky for Apple to make though.

bottlepalm 3y ago
Microsoft could have given the Windows phone some significant value with this kind of functionality. We’d be living in a different world.
jc_dc 3y ago
Have you actually used it for general computing tasks? If so, how was it?
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Oh yes, a lot. Our work environment is incredibly restricted so I can't easily connect to my home stuff. I have everything behind VPN which is blocked on the company network, I have no admin rights to do anything etc. I also require yubikeys (openPGP mode) to log into pretty much everything at home and the toolchain for this also can't be installed on my work stuff. SSH is also blocked, etc. So, what I do when I have something I need to mess with at home, is plug in my personal phone into the work dock. It has a completely independent 5G connection so I can do whatever I want, without needing to circumvent company protections, and without even using the company network at all. In DeX I mostly use outlook, webbrowser and Termux (which is amazing) for SSH using OpenPGP (using OKCAgent and OpenKeyChain to talk to the Yubikey). The office apps are also nice and very dex-enabled (they have a UI much more like a desktop than like a tablet in DeX mode) but I rarely use them. Same with Chrome etc, it has a full tab bar etc. Unfortunately firefox is not quite there yet, it's pretty sucky in DeX. I use element for all my chats (using matrix bridges to whatsapp etc) and that works OK in DeX. It also lacks a good "desktop-style" interface unfortunately. But overall it's pretty ok, it's definitely workable. There's a few annoying quirks but they're all pretty easy to work around. One of the issues is that the screen on the phone is often activated for no reason (leading me to worry about burn-in), but force-killing the apps in phone mode and then opening in DeX mostly fixes that. I wish Samsung would go all the way and really streamline this, but right now they're in a phase where DeX is basically neglected. Every few years they have a big marketing boost and they polish it up again but now they're in neglect mode :) Nevertheless it works ok though. PS: One major usecase I've seen people use is also to use remote desktop in fullscreen which solves a lot of its quirks obviously but it's not quite as standalone as I'd like. TL;DR: Great feature for when you need it and have a suitable dock nearby (or hotel TV and bluetooth keyboard/mouse), not something I'd use as a daily driver at this point.