It’s been tried before, more than once, but if it comes as a stock feature, maybe people will actually start to use the feature.
Google’s Pixel 9 range of fondleslabs is coming soon, and the company has already announced an event, Made by Google, for August 13 at 1000 Pacific Time (that’s 1700 UTC, and 1800 for Brits.) The new devices are very likely to run Android 15 – whose first developer preview appeared in February.
Android Police reports –with a video, below – that one of the less obvious features of the beta may continue to final release and could become more apparent: the desktop mode that can be activated in Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2.1.
Having a desktop mode in Android isn’t of itself a new thing. Samsung has offered its Dex feature since the Galaxy S8, and various vultures ventured Dex-wards in 2017 and again in 2018. The snag was that back then you needed a special dock to try it; now it works with USB-C docks in general.
Android 10 gained a hidden desktop mode in its developer features, but it wasn’t easy to find.
These days, the gap between PCs and phones is rather close. Monitors with USB C connections are quite ordinary now, with ordinary prices to match, unlike, say, their prices five years ago. You can even get affordable portable ones. While PCs are still plagued with proprietary wireless mice and keyboards, some can be switched to Bluetooth mode, like this inexpensive unit which the Reg FOSS desk uses when travelling. Even budget-model phones are capably specced: this vulture’s sub-£300 device has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of flash, and with USB-C everywhere there’s no need to faff around with converters or adapters.
If you don’t need any special hardware or software – as is increasingly the case now – can plug a cheapo keyboard and mouse into the back of your monitor and plug the phone into that, we suspect that this could prove to be a more popular option than fancier vendor-specific offerings of a few years ago.
Secure FOSS phone and laptop vendor Puri.sm has an eye on this segment, as we reported last year. Its offering was based around a variant of the NexDock hardware the Reg tried in 2019.
A phone might make a somewhat clunky laptop, but oddly enough a perfectly serviceable desktop if you don’t need to buy any additional kit for it to work. Even a clapped-out old phone with a cracked screen and little battery life. Being of an open sourcey persuasion, we’d love to see this sort of thing supported in replacement phone OSes such as postmarketOS or Ubuntu Touch. Not only might some of the usability issues go away, this could help the generic-Linux-on-phones movement gain some ground. ®