#Samsung dex for mac install#
#Samsung dex for mac android#
#Samsung dex for mac software#

#Samsung dex for mac install#

Not only that, but it's easy to use: just install the program on your Windows PC, and then connect a Samsung Galaxy Note 10 or Note 10+ via USB cable. Samsung DeX makes it possible to do everyday tasks on your smartphone as if it were a PC. Thanks to this app, you can create a desktop experience with your smartphone and get the most of your Samsung.

#Samsung dex for mac android#

But even in this app-based form, it’s a great peek at how nice it can be to run Android apps in a desktop environment.With the program Samsung DeX you can use all of your Samsung device's features on a larger screen. In its current form, DeX works well enough that I’m going to see if its even better with a dedicated hub. It looks a lot like the old Word Mobile app for Windows, or like Word for web. Microsoft Word, however, is another interesting example of a great Microsoft mobile app. You can resize it all you want, but it will present a one-column layout that is optimized only for a phone. The Microsoft Office app, embarrassingly, is one such app despite the fact that it is preinstalled on the Note. Not all apps understand or work well with DeX. But it appears that Samsung will keep the app while getting rid of its online service and handing that role over to Microsoft. We already knew that there would be some link between Samsung Gallery and OneDrive, but were confused about why they were doing this. I also discovered another aspect of the Samsung and Microsoft partnership: Samsung is telling its users to replace Samsung Cloud with OneDrive in its Gallery app. So Outlook for Android, for example, will expand to display additional column views if you make it bigger and wider. (And DeX goes one step further by making the default view of any app a kind of square window shape instead of the more typical portrait-style phone-shaped window. In experimenting with a few apps, I found the effect I was hoping for in Your Phone’s new Apps capability: Properly-written apps will dynamically adapt their layouts as you resize them. When you select the Start-like button, and All Apps view appears across multiple pages if required, and there’s a nice “Check out app for Samsung DeX” link to help you find apps that are optimized for this desktop environment. But when I restore the window-so that it’s floating, not full-screen-it’s razor-sharp. The display I’m using is 2160 x 1440 and from what I can tell, DeX wants to run at 1920 x 1080 so it’s a bit fuzzy when used full-screen. And that taskbar now looks and works more like what we see in Windows. There’s a desktop with a Start-like button, a taskbar, and a notification area with a clock and other related icons.

There is some precedent for third-party features like this being pulled into Android, but for now at least, it’s a Samsung-only feature, and one that is limited to its flagship-class handsets.Īll that said, DeX works well and should be familiar to anyone who’s used Windows or any other desktop environment. My only qualm here is that DeX is something that should come from the platform’s maker, in this case Google. And that suggests to me that a hardware-based solution-with a dedicated USB-C, display, keyboard, and mouse-would likely work quite well indeed. But there is one major change: the performance is much better now, and while there are occasional little slowdowns, it’s usable overall. Year-over-year, the DeX experience I’m seeing today with my Note 20 Ultra review unit seems very similar to what I saw previously. As original conceived in March 2017, Samsung DeX also required a hub, but with the August 2019 release of Note 10 line, Samsung released DeX apps for Windows and Mac, allowing PCs users to experience this environment using the display, keyboard, and mouse they’re already using. It was basically unusable.įor one-time fans of Windows phone like myself, Samsung DeX is, of course, a modern take on Continuum, a Windows desktop-like environment that required a USB-C hub and an external keyboard, mouse, and display. But at the time, I found that performance issues hampered the experience greatly.

#Samsung dex for mac software#

I’ve always been fascinated by this kind of thing and the promise of a single device that could, through some combination of hardware and software wizardry, replace two devices. One year ago this week, I looked at the then-new DeX app for Windows, which provides an Android-based desktop environment.