Products 1 - 40 of 992 - Sold & shipped by Double Dex, LLC. Product Image Apple MacBook Pro MGXC2LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop with Retina Display (512GB). Dec 20, 2016 - Though it sounds impressive on paper, the Samsung Gear S3 is. There's a heart-rate monitor on the underside, and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE,.

Perhaps you’ve heard this idea before: can a single device work as both your mobile phone and your desktop or laptop computer? If you have, and you’ve used the many prior attempts at it, you’ve probably been disappointed. A lot of companies, from Palm to Motorola and even Microsoft, have tried this idea, yet none have succeeded; we’re still all carrying around phones and laptops instead of just one, do-everything device. That’s the world Samsung is entering with DeX, a $149.99 docking station for the. On paper, it’s just like Microsoft’s Windows 10 Continuum: a basic dock that you plug the phone into that provides connections for a monitor, power, Ethernet, and USB devices. Hook up a monitor to the DeX’s HDMI port and pair a wireless mouse and keyboard to the phone, and boom, you instantly have a desktop workstation.

The “phone as PC” idea is a graveyard of failed attempts The software, however, is where Samsung is making its mark. Samsung has effectively taken Android apps, optimized a few of them for productivity, and managed to make a mobile-meets-desktop experience that actually feels good.

By comparison, Windows 10 Continuum is, well,, hamstrung by very limited app compatibility and poor performance. My initial thought was that DeX likely wouldn’t be much better, that it would have similar limitations or simply be a clever but unusable concept. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised as I’ve used DeX as my primary workstation for the past week. It has a much wider assortment of apps available than Windows 10 Continuum, and the Galaxy S8’s processor is capable of handling multiple windows and a lot of browser tabs with relative ease.

With few exceptions, I’ve been able to do the vast majority of my work tasks with DeX, which I can’t say about Continuum. That isn’t to say this idea is for everyone.

In fact, it’s probably not for most people. It’s safe to say we still haven’t arrived at the perfect one-device-for-everything solution. Between the cost — in addition to the $150 dock, you also have to supply a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and the $750 Galaxy S8 to make it all work — and DeX’s limitations, which I’ll get into, most people are still better served by a standard Windows or Mac laptop, or even a Chromebook. But it’s the closest anyone has come to turning a smartphone into a full PC, and it has me excited about an idea that I had all but written off before.

Plug a Galaxy S8 into the DeX dock for the first time and, in about a minute, a desktop environment, complete with app tray, shortcut bar, and system tray, will pop up on the connected monitor. All of the apps that you had been using on the phone before you docked it are available as icons at the bottom of the screen, which means there will likely be dozens of icons in the task bar right away.

The system tray at the lower right provides access to notifications, settings shortcuts, and the time and date, just like you might find on a Windows 10 computer. Hit the app tray icon at the lower left and you can launch any of your apps on the big screen. Samsung has worked to make sure its own apps — calendar, internet browser, email, messages, etc. — take advantage of the larger display with desktop interfaces. But lots of other apps adapt to the big screen as well, including Slack, Microsoft’s Office suite (I’m writing this in Word Mobile on DeX right now and it’s just as powerful as Word Mobile on my Surface Pro), and YouTube. Windows can be resized, rearranged, tiled, or stacked, just like you’re used to doing on a desktop computer. Keyboard shortcuts, such as Alt-Tab, also work, so it’s easy to transition to working on DeX just like you might on Windows or macOS.

DeX’s browser is its most impressive part The biggest test of these kinds of systems is always how well the browser works, and this is where DeX is most impressive. By default, Samsung’s internet browser will load desktop versions of websites, instead of mobile ones, and it supports content blockers and other extensions. Scrolling is fast and stutter-free, and it can handle multiple windows, multiple tabs (I’ve been able to use it with a dozen or more tabs running at any given time), and interactive web apps without grinding to a halt or having to frequently reload tabs. The Google Docs Android app is severely limited in its feature set compared to Docs online, but I was able to run the full version of it in DeX’s web browser without issue. The browser does have its limits — it struggles with the proprietary content management system we use at The Verge and Adobe Flash support is obviously out of the question — but for the most part, it loads pages just like Chrome or Safari does on a full computer. Java download for mac sierra. There are things that will frustrate power users, though. The browser’s tab management doesn’t compare to a desktop browser, and you can’t easily pull tabs out into separate windows or combine multiple browser windows into one group of tabs.