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This has been tried before, more than once, but if it becomes a standard feature, maybe people will actually start using it.
Google’s Pixel 9 touchscreen lineup is coming soon, and the company has already teased announced an event, Powered by Googlefor August 13 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time (that’s 5:00 p.m. UTC and 6:00 p.m. for the UK). The new devices will most likely run Android 15, which was first previewed for developers in February.
Android Police reports – with a video below – that one of the less obvious features of the beta could carry over to the final release and could become more apparent: desktop mode, which can be enabled in Android 14 QPR3 beta 2.1.
Having a desktop mode on Android isn’t new in itself. Samsung has offered its Dex feature since the Galaxy S8, and various vultures ventured into the Dex lane in 2017 and again in 2018. The catch is that back then, you needed a special dock to try it out; now, it works with USB-C docks in general.
Android 10 gained a hidden desktop mode in its developer features, but it was not easy to find.
These days, the gap between PCs and phones is pretty small. Monitors with USB-C connections are pretty commonplace now, with prices that are similar to what they were five years ago, for example. You can even get affordable portable models. While PCs are still plagued by proprietary wireless mice and keyboards, some can be switched to Bluetooth mode, like this one inexpensive unit which one to Reg FOSS office is used while traveling. Even budget phones have powerful specifications: this vulture device under £300 has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of flash, and with USB-C everywhere, there’s no need to bother with converters or adapters.
If you don’t need any special hardware or software (as is increasingly the case these days), you can plug a cheap keyboard and mouse into the back of your display and plug the phone into it. We suspect this could prove to be a more popular option than the fancier, vendor-specific offerings of a few years ago.
Puri.sm, a provider of secure FOSS phones and laptops, has its eye on this segment, as we reported last year. Its offering was based on a variant of the NexDock hardware. Reg tried in 2019.
A phone can make a somewhat bulky laptop, but oddly enough, a perfectly usable desktop if you don’t need to buy extra kit to run it. Even a beat-up old phone with a cracked screen and poor battery life. Being open source minded, we’d love to see this sort of thing supported in replacement phone operating systems like postmarketOS or Ubuntu Touch. Not only could some of the usability issues disappear, it could help the generic Linux on phones movement gain traction. ®